Law Commons^™

Heinous, Atrocious, And Cruel: Apprendi, Indeterminate Sentencing, And The Meaning Of Punishment, W. David Ball

Faculty Publications

Under Apprendi v. New Jersey, any fact that increases an offender's maximum punishment must be found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The Apprendi literature has focused on the allocation of power between judge and jury, ignoring entirely the role of the parole board in indeterminate sentences-that is, sentences which terminate in discretionary parole release. In an indeterminate sentence, a judge makes a pronouncement about the length of the prescriptive sentence to be imposed, but the parole board decides the actual sentence that is, in fact, imposed.

In this Article, I explore the Apprendi ramifications of indeterminate sentencing. In …

Death Penalty Appeals And Habeas Proceedings: The California Experience, Gerald F. Uelmen

Faculty Publications

Despite spending more than any other state on its implementation and administration, California today is saddled with a death penalty law that can be described only as completely dysfunctional. We have the longest death row in America, with approximately 670 inmates awaiting execution. Typically, the lapse of time between sentence and execution is twenty-five years, twice the national average, and is growing wider each year. One hundred nineteen inmates have spent more than twenty years on California's death row. Most of them will certainly die before they are ever executed. Since restoration of the death penalty in 1978, the leading …