Law Commons^™

Batson: Then And Now, Part Ii, John H. Blume, Elizabeth Piliavin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Aggravation And Mitigation In Capital Cases: What Do Jurors Think?, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Capital Jury Project in South Carolina interviewed jurors who sat in forty-one capital murder cases. The Project asked jurors a range of questions relating to crime, the defendant, the victim, the victim's family, the jurors' deliberations, the conduct of counsel, and background characteristics of the jurors. In this essay, Professor Stephen P. Garvey presents and examines data from the Project relating to the importance jurors attach to various aggravating and mitigating factors. The results suggest that jurors have a discernible moral compass. According to the data, jurors found especially brutal killings, killings with child victims, future dangerousness, and lack …

Batson: Then And Now, Part I, John H. Blume, Elizabeth Piliavin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Post-Mccleskey Racial Discrimination Claims In Capital Cases, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In federal habeas corpus proceedings, Earl Matthews, an African American, South Carolina death row inmate, alleged that his death sentence was the result of invidious racial discrimination that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. To support his contention, Matthews presented statistical evidence showing that in Charleston County, where a jury convicted him and sentenced him to death, the prosecutor was far more likely to seek a death sentence for a Black defendant accused of killing a white person than for any other racial combination of victims and defendants, and also that such a Black defendant was more …

But Was He Sorry? The Role Of Remorse In Capital Sentencing, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What role does remorse really play in capital sentencing? We divide this basic question in two. First, what makes jurors come to believe a defendant is remorseful? Second, does a belief in the defendant's remorse affect the jury's final judgment of life or death? Here we present a systematic, empirical analysis that tries to answer these questions.

What makes jurors think a defendant is remorseful? Among other things, we find that the more jurors think that the crime is coldblooded, calculated, and depraved and that the defendant is dangerous, the less likely they are to think the defendant is remorseful. …

Can Shaming Punishments Educate?, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

So-called "shaming" penalties have received a fair amount of attention in the popular press and, thanks primarily to the work of Dan Kahan and Toni Massaro, in the legal literature as well. Unfortunately, the current debate focuses on "shame" as the main way to understand what these penalties are all about. I argue that at least some of these so-called shaming penalties are better understood as "educative" penalties. I develop this "educating model" and contrast it with the "shaming model." I also suggest that penalties fitting the educating model have more normative appeal than those fitting the shaming model.

Unconscious Racism And The Criminal Law, Sheri Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Institutional Analysis And Physicians’ Rights After Vacco V. Quill, Larry I. Palmer

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Freeing Prisoners' Labor, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although labor was central to the internal life of the early penitentiary, it has virtually vanished from today's prison. In this article, Professor Garvey proposes making labor once again a key part of the prison regime. During the decades surrounding the turn of the century, organized labor and business successfully lobbied for protectionist state and federal legislation that prohibited private firms from contracting for prison labor and selling prison-made goods on the open market. This legislation abolished the old "contract" system of prison labor and replaced it with the "state-use" system. Under the state-use system, inmates work only for the …

Batson Ethics For Prosecutors And Trial Court Judges, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.