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The Death Penalty On The Streets: What The Eighth Amendment Can Teach About Regulating Police Use Of Force, Jelani Jefferson Exum, D. A. Telman Nov 2015

The Death Penalty On The Streets: What The Eighth Amendment Can Teach About Regulating Police Use Of Force, Jelani Jefferson Exum, D. A. Telman

Missouri Law Review

This Article offers punishment as another lens through which to view police force. The Supreme Court has consistently rejected arguments that the Eighth Amendment is the appropriate vehicle for dealing with excessive police force claims.5 However, reconceptualizing the use of deadly force by police officers as punishment provides a new understanding of the gravity of deadly police force and adds necessary substance to the reasonableness analysis. When police force is likened to punishment, the use of fatal force by police officers can be considered the administration of the death penalty on the streets, absent the procedural protections and focus on …


Death Row Conditions: Progression Toward Constitutional Protections, Nancy Holland Jul 2015

Death Row Conditions: Progression Toward Constitutional Protections, Nancy Holland

Akron Law Review

Beginning with recapitulation of the quest for the meaning and scope of the eighth amendment, this comment will review both the evolution of judicial scrutiny and the constitutional limitations of criminal incarceration and will also analyze the narrow body of case law affecting the quality of life on America's death rows.


Too Young For The Death Penalty: An Empirical Examination Of Community Conscience And The Juvenile Death Penalty From The Perspective Of Capital Jurors, William J. Bowers, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Valerie P. Hans, Michael E. Antonio Jun 2015

Too Young For The Death Penalty: An Empirical Examination Of Community Conscience And The Juvenile Death Penalty From The Perspective Of Capital Jurors, William J. Bowers, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Valerie P. Hans, Michael E. Antonio

Valerie P. Hans

As our analysis of jury decisionmaking in juvenile capital trials was nearing completion, the Missouri Supreme Court declared the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional in Simmons v. Roper. The court held that the execution of persons younger than eighteen years of age at the time of their crime violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. This decision patently rejected the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Stanford v. Kentucky, which permitted the execution of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. In deciding Simmons, the Missouri Supreme Court applied the U.S. Supreme Court's reasoning in Atkins v. Virginia to the juvenile death …


Jones, Lackey, And Teague, Richard Broughton Feb 2015

Jones, Lackey, And Teague, Richard Broughton

Richard Broughton

In a recent, high-profile ruling, a federal court finally recognized that a substantial delay in executing a death row inmate violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Courts have repeatedly rejected these so-called “Lackey claims,” making the federal court’s decision in Jones v. Chappell all the more important. And yet it was deeply flawed. This paper focuses on one of the major flaws in the Jones decision that largely escaped attention: the application of the non-retroactivity rule from Teague v. Lane. By comprehensively addressing the merits of the Teague bar as applied to Lackey claims, and making …


Jones, Lackey, And Teague, Richard Broughton Jan 2015

Jones, Lackey, And Teague, Richard Broughton

Richard Broughton

In a recent, high-profile ruling, a federal court finally recognized that a substantial delay in executing a death row inmate violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Courts have repeatedly rejected these so-called “Lackey claims,” making the federal court’s decision in Jones v. Chappell all the more important. And yet it was deeply flawed. This paper focuses on one of the major flaws in the Jones decision that largely escaped attention: the application of the non-retroactivity rule from Teague v. Lane. By comprehensively addressing the merits of the Teague bar as applied to Lackey claims, and making …


The Irrelevance Of Prisoner Fault For Excessively Delayed Executions, Russell L. Christopher Jan 2015

The Irrelevance Of Prisoner Fault For Excessively Delayed Executions, Russell L. Christopher

Washington and Lee Law Review

Are decades-long delays between sentencing and execution immune from Eighth Amendment violation because they are self-inflicted by prisoners, or is such prisoner fault for delays simply irrelevant to whether a state-imposed punishment is cruel and unusual? Typically finding delay to be the state’s responsibility, Justices Breyer and Stevens argue that execution following upwards of forty years of death row incarceration is unconstitutional. Nearly every lower court disagrees, reasoning that prisoners have the choice of pursuing appellate and collateral review (with the delay that entails) or crafting the perfect remedy to any delay by submitting, as Justice Thomas has invited complaining …


Death Penalty Drugs And The International Moral Marketplace, James Gibson, Corinna Barrett Lain Jan 2015

Death Penalty Drugs And The International Moral Marketplace, James Gibson, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Across the country, executions have become increasingly problematic as states have found it more and more difficult to procure the drugs they need for lethal injection.At first blush, the drug shortage appears to be the result of pharmaceutical industry norms; companies that make drugs for healing (mostly in Europe) have refused to be merchants of death. But closer inspection reveals that European governments are the true change agents here. For decades, those governments have tried-and failed-to promote abolition of the death penalty through traditional instruments of international law. Turns out that the best way to export their abolitionist norms was …


The Supreme Court And The Transformation Of Juvenile Sentencing, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso, Marsha Levick, Laurence Steinberg Jan 2015

The Supreme Court And The Transformation Of Juvenile Sentencing, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso, Marsha Levick, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the Supreme Court has transformed the constitutional landscape of juvenile crime regulation. In three strongly worded opinions, the Court held that imposing harsh criminal sentences on juvenile offenders violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In combination, these cases create a special status for juveniles under Eighth Amendment doctrine as a category of offenders whose culpability is mitigated by their youth and immaturity, even for the most serious offenses. The Court also emphasized that juveniles are more likely to reform than adult offenders, and that most should be given a meaningful opportunity to …