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Criminal Law

Articles

2012

Death penalty

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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Death Penalty And The Mentally Ill: A Selected And Annotated Bibliography, Jean Mattimoe Jan 2012

The Death Penalty And The Mentally Ill: A Selected And Annotated Bibliography, Jean Mattimoe

Articles

The United States Supreme Court over the last decade has selectively whittled away at the scope and availability of the death penalty by exempting certain groups from execution under the Eighth Amendment. In 2002 the court ruled that executing mentally retarded criminals violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2005 the court ruled that the Constitution forbids the execution of individuals who were under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes. Currently there is an active debate on whether to extend the categorical exemptions created by the Court to the mentally ill. At the forefront …


David Baldus And The Legacy Of Mccleskey V. Kemp, Samuel R. Gross Jan 2012

David Baldus And The Legacy Of Mccleskey V. Kemp, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

The first major empirical challenge to racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty in the United States was presented in federal court in the case of William L. Maxwell, who was sentenced to death in Arkansas in 1962 for the crime of rape.1 It was based on a landmark study by Marvin Wolfgang, a distinguished criminologist who had collected data on some 3000 rape convictions from 1945 through 1965 in selected counties across eleven southern states.2 He found that black men who were convicted of rape were seven times more likely to be sentenced to death than white …