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Full-Text Articles in Law

Beyond More Accurate Algorithms: Takeaways From Mccleskey Revisited, Ngozi Okidegbe Jan 2023

Beyond More Accurate Algorithms: Takeaways From Mccleskey Revisited, Ngozi Okidegbe

Michigan Law Review

A Review of McCleskey v. Kemp. By Mario Barnes, in Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law 557, 581. Edited by Bennett Capers, Devon W. Carbado, R.A. Lenhardt and Angela Onwuachi-Willig.


Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber Jun 2018

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Northwestern University Law Review

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …


Mccleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes From 1977-1991, John Charles Boger Jun 2018

Mccleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes From 1977-1991, John Charles Boger

Northwestern University Law Review

The litigation campaign that led to McCleskey v. Kemp did not begin as an anti-death-penalty effort. It grew in soil long washed in the blood of African-Americans, lynched or executed following rude semblances of trials and hasty appeals, which had prompted the NAACP from its very founding to demand “simple justice” in individual criminal cases. When the Warren Court signaled, in the early 1960s, that it might be open to reflection on broader patterns of racial discrimination in capital sentencing, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) began to gather empirical evidence and craft appropriate constitutional responses. As …


Implicit Racial Attitudes Of Death Penalty Lawyers, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson Dec 2014

Implicit Racial Attitudes Of Death Penalty Lawyers, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Sheri Lynn Johnson

Defense attorneys commonly suspect that the defendant's race plays a role in prosecutors' decisions to seek the death penalty, especially when the victim of the crime was white. When the defendant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, it is equally common for such attorneys to question the racial attitudes of the jury. These suspicions are not merely partisan conjectures; ample historical, statistical, and anecdotal evidence supports the inference that race matters in capital cases. Even the General Accounting Office of the United States concludes as much. Despite McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the United States Supreme Court …


Post-Mccleskey Racial Discrimination Claims In Capital Cases, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson Dec 2014

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

Sheri Lynn Johnson

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 …


Specific Agreements About Race: A Response To Professor Sunstein, Sheri Johnson Dec 2014

Specific Agreements About Race: A Response To Professor Sunstein, Sheri Johnson

Sheri Lynn Johnson

No abstract provided.


Post-Mccleskey Racial Discrimination Claims In Capital Cases, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson Dec 2014

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

John H. Blume

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 …


Does New York's Death Penalty Statute Violate The New York Constitution? (Symposium: New York State Constitutional Law: Trends And Developments), Richard Klein, Hon. Stewart F. Hancock, Jr., Christopher Quinn Jul 2011

Does New York's Death Penalty Statute Violate The New York Constitution? (Symposium: New York State Constitutional Law: Trends And Developments), Richard Klein, Hon. Stewart F. Hancock, Jr., Christopher Quinn

Richard Daniel Klein

No abstract provided.


Narrowing Racial Disparities In Sentencing Through A System Of Mandatory Downward Departures, Douglas Smith Jan 2006

Narrowing Racial Disparities In Sentencing Through A System Of Mandatory Downward Departures, Douglas Smith

The Modern American

No abstract provided.


Legislating Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson Jan 2006

Legislating Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty years ago, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rejected a capital defendant's claim that statistical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of Georgia's death penalty system constituted a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Yet, even as McCleskey effectively bars constitutional challenges to racial disparities in the criminal justice system where invidious bias is difficult to establish, the Court invites advocates to pursue legislation as a remedy to racial disparities. Indeed, the McCleskey Court offers as a rationale for its ruling the judiciary's institutional incompetence to remedy these disparities, holding that "McCleskey's arguments are best …


Race And The Death Penalty After Mccleskey: A Case Study Of Kentucky's Racial Justice Act, Justin R. Arnold Sep 2005

Race And The Death Penalty After Mccleskey: A Case Study Of Kentucky's Racial Justice Act, Justin R. Arnold

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Implicit Racial Attitudes Of Death Penalty Lawyers, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson Jul 2004

Implicit Racial Attitudes Of Death Penalty Lawyers, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Defense attorneys commonly suspect that the defendant's race plays a role in prosecutors' decisions to seek the death penalty, especially when the victim of the crime was white. When the defendant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, it is equally common for such attorneys to question the racial attitudes of the jury. These suspicions are not merely partisan conjectures; ample historical, statistical, and anecdotal evidence supports the inference that race matters in capital cases. Even the General Accounting Office of the United States concludes as much. Despite McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the United States Supreme Court …


Post-Mccleskey Racial Discrimination Claims In Capital Cases, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson Sep 1998

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 …


Does New York's Death Penalty Statute Violate The New York Constitution?, Honorable Stewart F. Hancock Jr., Christopher Quinn, Richard Klein Jan 1998

Does New York's Death Penalty Statute Violate The New York Constitution?, Honorable Stewart F. Hancock Jr., Christopher Quinn, Richard Klein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Does New York's Death Penalty Statute Violate The New York Constitution? (Symposium: New York State Constitutional Law: Trends And Developments), Richard Klein, Hon. Stewart F. Hancock, Jr., Christopher Quinn Jan 1998

Does New York's Death Penalty Statute Violate The New York Constitution? (Symposium: New York State Constitutional Law: Trends And Developments), Richard Klein, Hon. Stewart F. Hancock, Jr., Christopher Quinn

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.


Specific Agreements About Race: A Response To Professor Sunstein, Sheri Johnson Jan 1996

Specific Agreements About Race: A Response To Professor Sunstein, Sheri Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.