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Full-Text Articles in Law
Capital Jurors As The Litmus Test Of Community Conscience For The Juvenile Death Penalty, Michael E. Antonio, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Valerie P. Hans, William J. Bowers
Capital Jurors As The Litmus Test Of Community Conscience For The Juvenile Death Penalty, Michael E. Antonio, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Valerie P. Hans, William J. Bowers
Valerie P. Hans
This fall, the United States Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty in Simmons v. Roper. The Eighth Amendment issue before the Court in Simmons will be whether the juvenile death penalty accords with the conscience of the community. This article presents evidence that bears directly on the conscience of the community in juvenile capital cases as revealed through extensive in-depth interviews with jurors who made the critical life-or-death decision in such cases. The data come from the Capital Jury Project, a national study of the exercise of sentencing discretion in capital cases conducted with the …
The Death Penalty: Should The Judge Or The Jury Decide Who Dies?, Valerie P. Hans, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Amelia Courtney Hritz, Sheri L. Johnson, Caisa Elizabeth Royer, Martin T. Wells
The Death Penalty: Should The Judge Or The Jury Decide Who Dies?, Valerie P. Hans, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Amelia Courtney Hritz, Sheri L. Johnson, Caisa Elizabeth Royer, Martin T. Wells
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This article addresses the effect of judge versus jury decision making through analysis of a database of all capital sentencing phase hearing trials in the State of Delaware from 1977– 2007. Over the three decades of the study, Delaware shifted responsibility for death penalty sentencing from the jury to the judge. Currently, Delaware is one of the handful of states that gives the judge the final decision-making authority in capital trials. Controlling for a number of legally relevant and other predictor variables, we find that the shift to judge sentencing significantly increased the number of death sentences. Statutory aggravating factors, …