Law Commons^™

The Death Penalty In Delaware: An Empirical Study, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Johnson, Valerie P. Hans

Valerie P. Hans

This article reports the findings of the first phase of a three phase empirical study of the death penalty in Delaware. In phase 1, we examined only cases in which the defendant was sentenced to death. While our findings are preliminary, there appear to be, as numerous other studies have found in other jurisdictions, race of victim effects. Seventy percent of the death sentences were imposed in white victim cases, even though the majority of the murder victims are black. Additionally, Delaware has one of the highest death sentencing rates in the country. This high rate appears to be the …

Criminal Law - The Supreme Court Expands The Witt Principles To Exclude A Juror Who Would Follow The Law. Uttecht V. Brown, 127 S. Ct. 2218 (2007)., Brooke A. Thompson

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Competent Capital Representation: The Necessity Of Knowing And Heeding What Jurors Tell Us About Mitigation, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Scott E. Sundby

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Capital defense counsel have a duty at every stage of the case to take advantage of all appropriate opportunities to argue why death is not a suitable punishment for their particular client. But that duty can hardly be discharged effectively if the arguments are made in ignorance of available information concerning how persuasive they are likely to be to their audience.

Heeding that simple proposition we present lessons from the work of the Capital Jury Project, an ongoing empirical research effort built upon extended interviews with people who have actually sat on capital juries. We find that the standards for …

Death Becomes The State: The Death Penalty In New York State - Past, Present And Future, Deborah L. Heller

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Confronting Evil: Victims' Rights In An Age Of Terror, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

This Article examines a unique facet of the victims' rights movement: the use of victim impact evidence in the prosecution of individuals accused of mass killings. The Article provides the first detailed analysis of victim impact evidence employed in the capital trials of those responsible for the bombings in Oklahoma City (168 deaths) and the U.S. Embassy in Kenya (213 deaths), as well as the events of September 11 (almost 3000 deaths), and explores the many difficulties its use presents. These difficulties, the Article argues, warrant attention not only with respect to future U.S. mass killing trials in civilian courts, …

The Road Not Considered: Revising New Jersey's Death Penalty Statute, Robert Blecker

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Beyond A Conceivable Doubt: The Quest For A Fair And Constitutional Standard Of Proof In Death Penalty Cases, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The death penalty remains the most contentious issue in criminal law jurisprudence, and continues to be challenged on both constitutional and moral grounds. What is most remarkable about American death penalty jurisprudence is that it has traditionally focused on purely technical and procedural aspects of the imposition of the death penalty, despite the fact that the most vulnerable plank in the arsenal of death penalty defenders is evidence that innocent people have been, and will continue to be, executed. Perhaps no legal principle is more difficult to explain to the layman or first-year law student than that of all the …

An Analysis Of Death Penalty Decisions From The October 2006 Supreme Court Term (Nineteenth Annual Supreme Court Review, October 2006 Supreme Court Term), Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Thirty-Five Years Of Rape Reform: A Frustrating Search For Fundamental Fairness, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

This article will analyze the most significant changes in the manner in which individuals who are charged with the crime of rape are prosecuted for that offense. In the last thirty-five years, there has been a steady erosion of the due process rights of those accused of rape.

Kennedy V. Louisiana: A Chapter Of Subtle Changes In The Supreme Court’S Book On The Death Penalty—Sex Offenders: Recent Developments In Punishment And Management, Mary Graw Leary

Scholarly Articles

This paper examines the recent decision regarding the unconstitutionality of Louisiana's death penalty punishment for certain cases of child rape. The paper explores some of the nuanced language of the opinion as it indicates sublte shifts in the Court's death penalty analysis.

The Original Meaning Of "Unusual": The Eighth Amendment As A Bar To Cruel Innovation, John F. Stinneford

UF Law Faculty Publications

In recent years, both legal scholars and the American public have become aware that something is not quite right with the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. Legal commentators from across the spectrum have described the Court's treatment of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause as "embarrassing," "ineffectual and incoherent," a "mess," and a "train wreck." The framers of the Bill of Rights understood the word "unusual" to mean "contrary to long usage." Recognition of the word's original meaning will precisely invert the "evolving standards of decency" test and ask the Court to compare challenged punishments with the longstanding principles and …

The Supreme Court And The Politics Of Death, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

This article explores the evolving role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the politics of death. By constitutionalizing the death penalty in the 1970s, the Supreme Court unintentionally set into motion political forces that have seriously undermined the Court's vision of a death penalty that is fairly administered and imposed only on the worst offenders. With the death penalty established as a highly salient political issue, politicians - legislators, prosecutors, and governors - have strong institutional incentives to make death sentences easier to achieve and carry out. The result of this vicious cycle is not only more executions, but less …

Engaging Capital Emotions, Douglas A. Berman, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, is about to decide whether the Eighth Amendment forbids capital punishment for child rape. Commentators are aghast, viewing this as a vengeful recrudescence of emotion clouding sober, rational criminal justice policy. To their minds, emotion is distracting. To ours, however, emotion is central to understand the death penalty. Descriptively, emotions help to explain many features of our death-penalty jurisprudence. Normatively, emotions are central to why we punish, and denying or squelching them risks prompting vigilantism and other unhealthy outlets for this normal human reaction. The emotional case for the death penalty for child …

Blood Relations: Collective Memory, Cultural Trauma, & The Prosecution & Execution Of Timothy Mcveigh, Jody Lynee Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, processes of reconstruction - remembering victims, caring for family members and survivors, and punishing the perpetrators - began even as debris from the Murrah Federal Building was being cleared. Based on conclusions obtained from intensive interviews with 27 victims' family members and survivors, this article explores how memory of the bombing as a culturally traumatic event was constructed through participation in groups formed after the bombing and participation in the legal proceedings against perpetrators Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. These acts cultivated the formation of various relationships - between family members and …

Social Science And The Evolving Standards Of Death Penalty Law, Samuel R. Gross, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Unlike many of the topics covered in this book, death penalty litigation involves a wide variety of empirical issues. The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides that "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted." But what is a "cruel and unusual punishment?" It could be a punishment that is morally unacceptable to the American people, like cutting off noses or hands. Following the other clauses of the amendment, it could be a punishment that is excessive, in that a lesser penalty would achieve the same ends. For example, if a …

Frequency And Predictors Of False Conviction: Why We Know So Little, And New Data On Capital Cases, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien

Articles

In the first part of this article, we address the problems inherent in studying wrongful convictions: our pervasive ignorance and the extreme difficulty of obtaining the data that we need to answer even basic questions. The main reason that we know so little about false convictions is that, by definition, they are hidden from view. As a result, it is nearly impossible to gather reliable data on the characteristics or even the frequency of false convictions. In addition, we have very limited data on criminal investigations and prosecutions in general, so even if we could somehow obtain data on cases …

To Act Or Not To Act: Will New York's Defeated Death Penalty Be Resurrected? , Diana N. Huffman

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Capital punishment has always been a topic of controversy in the United States. The debate about the death penalty, its value as a way to permanently incapacitate society's most dangerous criminals and its effectiveness as a deterrent to violent crime, has increased. This phenomenon is particularly visible in New York State, where, in 2004, the New York Court of Appeals struck down the State's death penalty statute as invalid under the New York Constitution. This Note describes the evolution of New York's 1995 death penalty statute, analyzing the way in which the state legislature could respond to the statute's unconstitutionality, …

Abolition In The U.S.A. By 2050: On Political Capital And Ordinary Acts Of Resistance, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The United States, like the larger international community, likely will tend toward greater abolition of the death penalty during the first half of the twenty-first century. A handful of individual states – states that have historically carried out few or no executions – probably will abolish capital punishment over the next twenty years, which will create political momentum and ultimately a federal constitutional ban on capital punishment in the United States. It is entirely reasonable to expect that, by the mid-twenty-first century, capital punishment will have the same status internationally as torture: an outlier practice, prohibited by international agreements and …