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Criminal Law

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Selected Works

2008

Criminal Law and Procedure

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Equal Sentences For Unequal Participation: Should The Eighth Amendment Allow All Juvenile Murder Accomplices To Receive Life Without Parole?, Brian Gallini Sep 2008

Equal Sentences For Unequal Participation: Should The Eighth Amendment Allow All Juvenile Murder Accomplices To Receive Life Without Parole?, Brian Gallini

Brian Gallini

No court has addressed the constitutional significance of sentencing juvenile murder accomplices who play a minimal role in the underlying killing to life in prison without parole. Indeed, no precedent makes clear whether it is cruel and unusual to impose that sentence on juvenile offenders convicted of first-degree murder pursuant to either the felony-murder doctrine or an accomplice theory of liability, notwithstanding their minimal involvement in the victim’s death. To investigate this unanswered question, Part I of this Article explores the imposition of life without parole sentences on juvenile non-killers convicted of murder via either the felony-murder doctrine or accomplice …

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The Death Penalty In Delaware: An Empirical Study, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Johnson, Valerie P. Hans Aug 2008

The Death Penalty In Delaware: An Empirical Study, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Johnson, Valerie P. Hans

Valerie P. Hans

This article reports the findings of the first phase of a three phase empirical study of the death penalty in Delaware. In phase 1, we examined only cases in which the defendant was sentenced to death. While our findings are preliminary, there appear to be, as numerous other studies have found in other jurisdictions, race of victim effects. Seventy percent of the death sentences were imposed in white victim cases, even though the majority of the murder victims are black. Additionally, Delaware has one of the highest death sentencing rates in the country. This high rate appears to be the …

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