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Full-Text Articles in Law
There Must Be A Means: The Backward Jurisprudence Of Baze V. Rees, Nadia N. Sawicki
There Must Be A Means: The Backward Jurisprudence Of Baze V. Rees, Nadia N. Sawicki
Nadia N. Sawicki
The Supreme Court’s plurality opinion in Baze v. Rees begins with a seemingly simple assertion of constitutional law. “We begin with the principle, settled by Gregg, that capital punishment is constitutional.” It continues, “It necessarily follows that there must be a means of carrying it out.” This second pronouncement provides the foundation for the Supreme Court’s holding in Baze that Kentucky’s refusal to modify its lethal injection procedure does not violate the Eighth Amendment. However, in taking the position that the constitutionality of an existing method of capital punishment is dependent on the availability of alternative execution procedures, the Supreme …
Original Habeas Redux, Lee B. Kovarsky
Original Habeas Redux, Lee B. Kovarsky
Lee Kovarsky
In "Original Habeas Redux," I map the modern dimensions of the Supreme Court’s most exotic jurisdiction—the original habeas writ. The Court has not issued such relief since 1925 and, until recently, had not ordered a case transferred pursuant to that authority in over fifty years. In August 2009, by transferring a capital prisoner’s original habeas petition to a federal district court rather than dismissing it outright, In re Davis abruptly thrust this obscure power back into mainstream legal debate over both the death penalty and the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. Scrambling to understand how the authority has evolved since its …
Death, Ineligibility And Habeas Corpus, Lee B. Kovarsky
Death, Ineligibility And Habeas Corpus, Lee B. Kovarsky
Lee Kovarsky
I examine the interaction between what I call 'death ineligibility' challenges and the habeas writ. A death ineligibility claim alleges that a criminally-confined capital prisoner belongs to a category of offenders for which the Eighth Amendment forbids execution. By contrast, a 'crime innocence' claim alleges that, colloquially speaking, a capital prisoner 'wasn’t there, and didn’t do it.' In the last eight years, the Supreme Court has identified several new ineligibility categories, including mentally retarded offenders. Configured primarily to address crime innocence and procedural challenges, however, modern habeas law is poorly equipped to accommodate ineligibility claims. Death Ineligibility traces the genesis …