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Full-Text Articles in Law
Death Penalty For Women In North Carolina, Elizabeth Rapaport, Victor Streib
Death Penalty For Women In North Carolina, Elizabeth Rapaport, Victor Streib
Faculty Scholarship
Is Justice Marshall right? Have women received "favored treatment" under our death penalty laws and procedures? The national data might lead to such a presumption, given that over 99% of the people executed in the United States are men, but the analyses and explanations are far from simple. The authors have written about this national phenomenon for the past two decades, sharing a strong interest in the issue but not always agreeing in their explanations. Now we examine the North Carolina experience within the national context. This article reports the results of that examination, beginning with North Carolina's history of …
Staying Alive: Executive Clemency, Equal Protection, And The Politics Of Gender In Women's Capital Cases, Elizabeth Rapaport
Staying Alive: Executive Clemency, Equal Protection, And The Politics Of Gender In Women's Capital Cases, Elizabeth Rapaport
Faculty Scholarship
In this Article, I will review the matrix in which executive decisions in women's capital clemency cases are made, a matrix supplied by modern equal protection law, the nature and scope of the clemency power, gender politics, and contemporary death row. I will then conduct two thought experiments. Each invented case tests the relevance of gender in legally and politically acceptable contemporary clemency decisions. The goal is to understand the politics and law of granting or denying that very rare boon-commutation of sentence - to a female death row prisoner. The exercise offers support for two conclusions. In the age …
Equality Of The Damned: The Execution Of Women On The Cusp Of The 21st Century, Elizabeth Rapaport
Equality Of The Damned: The Execution Of Women On The Cusp Of The 21st Century, Elizabeth Rapaport
Faculty Scholarship
This article explores why women are rarely executed and examines the execution of four women in the Post-Furman Era, focusing on the execution of Karla Faye Tucker.
The Death Penalty And Gender Discrimination, Elizabeth Rapaport
The Death Penalty And Gender Discrimination, Elizabeth Rapaport
Faculty Scholarship
Despite the paucity of research on the death penalty and gender discrimination, it is widely supposed that women murderers are chivalrously spared the death sentence. This supposition is fueled by the relatively small number of women who are condemned. This article argues that women are represented on contemporary U.S. death rows in numbers commensurate with the infrequency of female commission of those crimes which our society labels sufficiently reprehensible to merit capital punishment. Additionally, preliminary investigation suggests that death-sentenced women are more likely than death-sentenced men to have killed intimates, although the explanation for this disparity is not yet at …
Some Questions About Gender And The Death Penalty, Elizabeth Rapaport
Some Questions About Gender And The Death Penalty, Elizabeth Rapaport
Faculty Scholarship
No capital punishment statute classifies by gender, but it is arguable that gender bias infects the administration of capital punishment because the discretion of prosecutors, juries and judges is employed to the advantage of female murderers. Prior to Furman, capital punishment statutes typically gave sentencing authorities untrammelled discretion to mete out life or death. Although sentencing discretion has been substantially reduced in the modern death penalty regime, it remains arguable post-Furman that the sparseness of women on death row testifies to the discriminatory use of capital sentencing discretion. However, in light of the recent decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, in …