Law Commons^™

Justice Stevens' Temperance, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

On the last opinion day of the last of his 35 Terms on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens issued his valedictory opinion, a 57-page dissent in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Justice Stevens laid out an expansive vision of constitutional interpretation that Justice Alito aptly called "eloquent" in his plurality opinion. Not one for sentimental farewells, Justice Scalia was less generous: "Justice Stevens' approach," he wrote in the last line of his concurring opinion," puts democracy in peril."

Rates Of Reversible Error And The Risk Of Wrongful Execution, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Innocent fatalities are a concern of all social activity with a capacity to kill. This is especially true when the social activity is the death penalty since an innocent person's execution is not simply a tragic collateral consequence of activity with a non-fatal objective. Instead, the taking of life is the goal of the enterprise, and the killing is the intended act of the state.

There is another difference between accidental fatalities in other social activities and those that occur when the capital system miscarries. Typically, the former fatalities are easy to spot and quantify; the latter are not. Precisely …

Death Is The Whole Ball Game, Jeffrey A. Fagan, James S. Liebman, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

In Capital Appeals Revisited and The Meaning of Capital Appeals, Barry Latzer and James N.G. Cauthen argue that a study of capital appeals should focus only on overturned findings of guilt, and complain that in A Broken System we examine all overturned capital verdicts. But the question they want studied cannot provide an accurate evaluation of a system of capital punishment. By proposing to count only "conviction" error and not "sentence" error, Latzer and Cauthen ignore that if a death sentence is overturned, the case is no longer capital and the system of capital punishment has failed to achieve its …

Death Matters – A Reply To Latzer And Cauthen, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

The legal treatment of capital punishment in the United States "rests squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two. This predicate is among "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and determine whether a punishment is "cruel and unusual" in violation of the Constitution. Because "'[f]rom the point of view of the defendant, [death] is different in both its severity …

Wiretapping And Bugging: Striking A Balance Between Privacy And Law Enforcement, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The conflict between individual privacy and the needs of law enforcement occurs at a number of points in our system of criminal justice. It is not unique to wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping, but the competing claims in that area do have their own special character. They are qualitatively different from those in regard to, say, confessions. The kinds of crimes and criminals affected are different, as are the relevant assertions about individual freedom.

Law enforcement officials, almost to a man, consider wiretapping and eavesdropping valuable weapons in the fight against crime. They are most helpful in regard to consensual crimes …