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The Decline Of The Juvenile Death Penalty: Scientific Evidence Of Evolving Norms, Jeffery Fagan
The Decline Of The Juvenile Death Penalty: Scientific Evidence Of Evolving Norms, Jeffery Fagan
Faculty Scholarship
Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Atkins v. Virginia holding that the execution of mentally retarded persons violated the Eighth Amendment, legal scholars, advocates, and journalists began to speculate that the Court would next turn its attention to the question of the execution of persons who were juveniles – below eighteen years of age – at the time they committed homicide. Following the Atkins decision, four Justices expressed the view that the rationale of Atkins also supported the conclusion that execution of juvenile offenders was unconstitutional. A constitutional test of capital punishment for juveniles was inevitable. …
Brecht V. Abrahamson: Harmful Error In Habeas Corpus Law, James S. Liebman, Randy Hertz
Brecht V. Abrahamson: Harmful Error In Habeas Corpus Law, James S. Liebman, Randy Hertz
Faculty Scholarship
For the past two and one-half decades, the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have applied the same rule for assessing the harmlessness of constitutional error in habeas corpus proceedings as they have applied on direct appeal of both state and federal convictions. Under that rule, which applied to all constitutional errors except those deemed per se prejudicial or per se reversible, the state could avoid reversal upon a finding of error only by proving that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The Supreme Court adopted this stringent standard in Chapman v. California to fulfill the federal …