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Death Penalty Exceptionalism And Administrative Law, Corinna Lain

Law Faculty Publications

"In the world of capital punishment, the oft-repeated refrain “death is different” stands for the notion that when the state exercises its most awesome power—the power to take human life—every procedural protection should be provided. Every safeguard should be met. Granted, doing so makes the death penalty cumbersome. And granted, it slows what Justice Blackmun famously called “the machinery of death.” But when the stakes are literally life and death, the idea is that we ought to make sure that whatever the state does, it does right.

Scholars have lamented the way that this idea of death penalty exceptionalism has …