Law Commons^™

Criminal Justice Secrets, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The American criminal justice system is cloaked in secrecy. The government employs covert surveillance operations. Grand-jury proceedings are hidden from public view. Prosecutors engage in closed-door plea-bargaining and bury exculpatory evidence. Juries convict defendants on secret evidence. Jury deliberations are a black box. And jails and prisons implement clandestine punishment practices. Although there are some justifications for this secrecy, the ubiquitous nature of it is contrary to this nation’s Founders’ steadfast belief in the transparency of criminal justice proceedings. Further, the pervasiveness of secrecy within today’s criminal justice system raises serious constitutional concerns. The accumulation of secrecy and the aggregation …

Science And The Eighth Amendment, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

As time hurtles forward, new science constantly emerges, and many scientific fields can shed light on whether a punishment is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, or even on whether bail or fines are unconstitutionally excessive under the Eighth Amendment. In fact, in recent years, science has played an increasingly important role in the Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. From the development of an offender’s brain, to the composition of lethal injection drugs, even to measurements of pain, knowledge of various scientific fields is becoming central to understanding whether a punishment is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual. There are a number of limits to …

Cruel Techniques, Unusual Secrets, William W. Berry, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the recent case of Glossip v. Gross, the Supreme Court denied a death row petitioner’s challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol. An important part of Justice Alito’s majority opinion highlighted the existence of a relationship between the constitutionality of a punishment and the requirement of a constitutional technique available to administer the punishment.

Far from foreclosing future challenges, this principle ironically highlights the failure of the Court to describe the relationship under the Eighth Amendment between three distinct categories of punishment: (1) the type of punishment imposed by the court — i.e., death penalty, life without parole, life with …

Taking Dignity Seriously: Excavating The Backdrop Of The Eighth Amendment, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The U.S. punishment system is in turmoil. We have a historically unprecedented number of offenders in prison, and our prisoners are serving longer sentences than in any other country. States are surreptitiously experimenting with formulas for lethal injection cocktails, and some prisoners are suffering from botched executions. Despite this tumult, the Eighth Amendment of our Constitution does place limits on the punishments that may be imposed and how they may be implemented. The difficulty, though, is that the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence is a bit of a mess. The Court has been consistent in stating that a focus on …

Juries And The Criminal Constitution, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Judges are regularly deciding criminal constitutional issues based on changing societal values. For example, they are determining whether police officer conduct has violated society’s "reasonable expectations of privacy" under the Fourth Amendment and whether a criminal punishment fails to comport with the "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" under the Eighth Amendment. Yet judges are not trained to assess societal values, nor do they, in assessing them, ordinarily consult data to determine what those values are. Instead, judges turn inward, to their own intuitions, morals, and values, to determine these matters. But judges’ internal …

Death And Rehabilitation, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

While rehabilitation is reemerging as an important penological goal, the Supreme Court is eroding the long-revered divide between capital and non-capital sentences. This raises the question of whether and how rehabilitation applies in the capital context. Courts and scholars have long concluded that it does not — that death is completely irrelevant to rehabilitation. Yet, historically, the death penalty in this country has been imposed in large part to induce the rehabilitation of offenders’ characters. Additionally, there are tales of the worst offenders transforming their characters when they are facing death, and several legal doctrines are based on the idea …

The Missing Jury: The Neglected Role Of Juries In Eighth Amendment Punishments Clause Determinations, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A recent study of death penalty cases has revealed that judges, who are ordinarily thought of as the guardians of criminal defendants’ constitutional rights, are more likely to impose harsher punishments than jurors. This may be unsettling in its own right, but it is especially concerning because judges are the individuals charged with determining whether punishments are unconstitutionally cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment, and these determinations are supposed to be based on “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” The study suggests that judges are out of step with society’s moral norms, …

Judging Cruelty, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

he wisdom of the death penalty has recently come under attack in a number of states. This raises the question of whether states’ retreat from the death penalty, or other punishments, will pressure other states - either politically or constitutionally - to similarly abandon the punishment. Politically, states may succumb to the trend of discontinuing a punishment. Constitutionally, states may be forced to surrender the punishment if it is considered cruel, and, as a result of a large number of states renouncing it, the punishment also becomes unusual. If a punishment is thus found to be both cruel and unusual, …

Does The Eighth Amendment Punishments Clause Prohibit Only Punishments That Are Both Cruel And Unusual, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

There is a great struggle in the United States between proponents of the death penalty and death penalty abolitionists who believe that the practice is cruel and even unconstitutional. Although the punishment of death is enshrined in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, the Supreme Court seems to have followed its moral compass in chipping away at the death penalty because of the cruelty of the practice. The Court's struggle between the text of the Constitution and its moral inclinations in the death penalty context has resulted in an inconsistent and confusing Eighth Amendment Punishments Clause jurisprudence. While …

Does Stare Decisis Apply In The Eighth Amendment Death Penalty Context, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Throughout the past few decades, the Supreme Court has steadily chipped away at the death penalty. It was only recently, however, that courts have confronted what role precedent plays in the Eighth Amendment death penalty context. Surprisingly, few scholars have yet explored this important and complicated issue. Precedent in this area is unique because the law of the Eighth Amendment is always changing and the Eighth Amendment has been interpreted to be applied more broadly in the death penalty context. This Article argues that precedent in the Eighth Amendment death penalty context does not apply in the typical fashion. Instead …