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Full-Text Articles in Law
Childhood Abuse And Adult Murder: Implications For The Death Penalty, Phyllis L. Crocker
Childhood Abuse And Adult Murder: Implications For The Death Penalty, Phyllis L. Crocker
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
A jury that convicts a defendant of capital murder must then decide whether that defendant deserves a life sentence or death. Mitigating evidence is crucial to the defense at this stage because such evidence may provide the jury with a basis for imposing a life sentence. In this article, Professor Crocker argues that evidence that a defendant was abused as a child is paradigmatic mitigating evidence. A detailed presentation of the defendant's childhood experience and a cogent explanation of its long-term repercussions will enable the jury to understand why the defendant committed the crime, perhaps allowing the jury to sympathize …
Life, Death And The Law - And Why Capital Punishment Is Legally Insupportable , Peter Fitzpatrick
Life, Death And The Law - And Why Capital Punishment Is Legally Insupportable , Peter Fitzpatrick
Cleveland State Law Review
Given that law has an integral commitment to life, in this lecture I want to show how the law should manifest something of a fundamental dissonance, even a terminal incoherence, when law is called upon to deal death. That is what happens in the judicial discourse on the death penalty in the United States. I will approach this demonstration in a way that may at first seem paradoxical, in a way that will bring out the deep affinity between law and death. That affinity is one in which death is, in a sense, the limit of law; a limit that …