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Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Law
Knockin' On Heaven's Door: Rethinking The Role Of Religion In Death Penalty Cases, Gary J. Simson, Stephen P. Garvey
Knockin' On Heaven's Door: Rethinking The Role Of Religion In Death Penalty Cases, Gary J. Simson, Stephen P. Garvey
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Religion has played a prominent role at various points of capital trials. In jury selection, peremptory challenges have been exercised against prospective jurors on the basis of their religion. At the sentencing phase, defendants have offered as mitigating evidence proof of their religiosity, and the prosecution has introduced evidence of the victim's religiosity. In closing argument, quotations from the Bible and other appeals to religion have long been common. During deliberations, jurors have engaged in group prayer and tried to sway one another with quotes from scripture.
Such practices have not gone unquestioned. Rather remarkably, however, the questions have almost …
Forecasting Life And Death: Juror Race, Religion, And Attitude Toward The Death Penalty, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells
Forecasting Life And Death: Juror Race, Religion, And Attitude Toward The Death Penalty, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Determining whether race, sex, or other juror characteristics influence how capital case jurors vote is difficult. Jurors tend to vote for death in more egregious cases and for life in less egregious cases no matter what their own characteristics. And a juror's personal characteristics may get lost in the process of deliberation because the final verdict reflects the jury's will, not the individual juror's. Controlling for the facts likely to influence a juror's verdict helps to isolate the influence of a juror's personal characteristics. Examining each juror's first sentencing vote reveals her own judgment before the majority works its will. …
Innocence Protection Act: Death Penalty Reform On The Horizon, Ronald Weich
Innocence Protection Act: Death Penalty Reform On The Horizon, Ronald Weich
All Faculty Scholarship
The criminal justice pendulum may be swinging back in the direction of fairness. The Innocence Protection Act of 2001, introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives earlier this year, promises meaningful reforms in the administration of capital punishment in the United States.
Unlike previous slabs at reform, the Innocence Protection Act (lPA) has a real chance to become law because it commands unusually broad bipartisan support. The Senate bill (S. 486) is sponsored by Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont and Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon. The House bill (H.R. 912) is sponsored by Democrat Bill Delahunt of …
Walking The Edge Of Death: An Annotated Bibliography On Juveniles, The Mentally Ill, And The Death Penalty, Susan M. Boland
Walking The Edge Of Death: An Annotated Bibliography On Juveniles, The Mentally Ill, And The Death Penalty, Susan M. Boland
Law Librarian Articles and Other Publications
The death penalty is not as monolithic as it seems at first glance. A storm of debate has centered on the application of this, the harshest criminal penalty of all, to the mentally ill, mentally retarded, and juveniles. They are our most vulnerable and least culpable citizens. This bibliography consists of annotated references to periodical articles, books, Web sites, and Supreme Court cases that examine the application of the death penalty to juveniles, the mentally ill, and the mentally retarded. It does not include newspaper articles, popular magazines, Web sites that offer no substantive content, or materials that are unobtainable …
The Deadly Paradox Of Capital Jurors, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells
The Deadly Paradox Of Capital Jurors, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
We examine support for the death penalty among a unique group of respondents: one hundred and eighty-seven citizens who actually served as jurors on capital trials in South Carolina. Capital jurors support the death penalty as much as, if not more than, members of the general public. Yet capital jurors, like poll respondents, harbor doubts about the penalty's fairness. Moreover, jurors--black jurors and Southern Baptists in particular--are ready to abandon their support for the death penalty when the alternative to death is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, especially when combined with a requirement of restitution. Support for the …
Criminal Law: Guilty Of Something: Gilson V. State And The Death Penalty For Omission In Oklahoma, Carla Mullins
Criminal Law: Guilty Of Something: Gilson V. State And The Death Penalty For Omission In Oklahoma, Carla Mullins
Oklahoma Law Review
No abstract provided.
The Right To Kill In Cold Blood: Does The Death Penalty Violate Human Rights, Alan Ryan
The Right To Kill In Cold Blood: Does The Death Penalty Violate Human Rights, Alan Ryan
Cleveland State Law Review
The essence of the argument is this: all punishment must be inflicted in cold blood; whatever damage we do to others not in cold blood is not punishment but self-defense or revenge; what we have a right to inflict in cold blood is a question of the rules of just social cooperation and especially the justice of the sanctions required to sustain those rules; it is here argued that the fundamental principle is that we may inflict whatever punishment is necessary to deter wrongdoing and not disproportionate to the offence; I do not dismiss 'pure' retribution as a goal of …
Plea Bargaining In The Shadow Of Death, Joseph L. Hoffmann, Marcy L. Kahn, Steven W. Fisher
Plea Bargaining In The Shadow Of Death, Joseph L. Hoffmann, Marcy L. Kahn, Steven W. Fisher
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
It's Time To Put The Military's Death Penalty To Sleep , Michael I. Spak
It's Time To Put The Military's Death Penalty To Sleep , Michael I. Spak
Cleveland State Law Review
Part I will focus on the death penalty in the civilian sector of the United States. It begins with a brief history of and an introduction to death penalty laws in the United States. A critical examination of the primary arguments used to justify the death penalty follows. Part I next offers a brief overview of other independent reasons for the abolition of the death penalty. After having concluded that the application of the death penalty is unfair in the civilian sector and should thus be abolished, the article will then shift its focus to the death penalty in the …
Free Exercise Rights Of Capital Jurors, Brian Galle
Free Exercise Rights Of Capital Jurors, Brian Galle
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The Supreme Court has said that the Constitution permits trial judges to exclude from the pool of potential capital trial jurors any persons whose views on the death penalty would likely substantially impair their ability to reach an impartial verdict. This Note argues that the Court's analysis to date is incomplete, in that it omits close evaluation of potential conflicts between such exclusions and the Free Exercise Clause. The Note argues further that a court should apply strict scrutiny to any state action, such as exclusion for cause, that burdens the use of religious beliefs in the mental processes of …
Playing God: An Essay On Law, Philosophy, And American Capital Punishment, Samuel J. Levine
Playing God: An Essay On Law, Philosophy, And American Capital Punishment, Samuel J. Levine
Scholarly Works
This article looks at the capital sentencer's decision: Whether a death-eligible defendant will in fact receive the death sentence. Based in part on an examination of Jewish law and philosophy, Professor Levine identifies three particular areas in which it can be said that the Supreme Court requires the capital sentencer to "play God." First, capital sentencers are asked to ascertain the degree of a defendant's culpability by looking at factors that affect free will and victim impact evidence, implicating moral luck. Capital sentencers are also required to determine a person's total moral worth by considering character evidence. Finally, the Supreme …
Look Who's Extrapolating: A Reply To Hoffmann, Valerie West, Jeffery Fagan, James S. Liebman
Look Who's Extrapolating: A Reply To Hoffmann, Valerie West, Jeffery Fagan, James S. Liebman
Faculty Scholarship
In late March, a reporter called with news of a pirated copy of Professor Joseph Hoffinann's soon-to-be-published "attack" on our study, A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995. Did we care to comment? Obtaining our own copy revealed that Professor Hoffmann's fusillade missed its mark (he misstates what we did) and boomeranged (his mischaracterizations of our analysis accurately describe his own). We do care to comment, and Hoffmann and the Indiana Law Journal have graciously let us do so.
Hoffmann's main claim is that we "extrapolated" the 68% rate of reversible error we reported for capital verdicts …