Criminal Law Commons^™

Missing Mcveigh, Michael E. Tigar

Michigan Law Review

The bombing that killed at least 169 people became an event by which time was thereafter measured — at least in Oklahoma. Ninety minutes after the bombing, a state trooper arrested Timothy McVeigh on a traffic charge; within hours, he was linked to the bombing, and the legal process began. Terry Nichols, who had met McVeigh when they were in the army together, was arrested in Herington, Kansas, where he lived with his wife and daughter. The Tenth Circuit chief judge designated Richard Matsch, chief judge for the District of Colorado, to preside over the case. Judge Matsch came to …

The Banality Of Wrongful Executions, Brandon L. Garrett

Michigan Law Review

What is so haunting about the known wrongful convictions is that those cases are the tip of the iceberg. Untold numbers of unnoticed errors may send the innocent to prison — and to the death chamber. That is why I recommend to readers a trilogy of fascinating new books that peer deeper into this larger but murkier problem. Outside the rarified group of highly publicized exonerations, which have themselves done much to attract attention to the causes of wrongful convictions, errors may be so mundane that no one notices them unless an outsider plucks a case from darkness and holds …

Cold Comfort Food: A Systematic Examination Of The Rituals And Rights Of The Last Meal, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

Articles

Last meals are a resilient ritual accompanying executions in the United States. Yet states vary considerably in the ways they administer last meals. This paper explores the recent decision in Texas to abolish the tradition altogether. It seeks to understand, through consultation of historical and contemporary sources, what the ritual signifies. We then go on to analyze execution procedures in all 35 of the states that allowed executions in 2010, and show that last meal allowances are paradoxically at their most expansive in states traditionally associated with high rates of capital punishment (Texas now being the exception to that rule.) …

The Dignity Of The Human Person: Catholic Social Teaching And The Practice Of Criminal Punishment, Dora W. Klein

Faculty Articles

The moral foundation that supports the Catholic Church's opposition to the death penalty is wide and deep. This Article proposes that despite the oft-repeated maxim that "death is different," the same foundation that supports efforts to abolish the death penalty can also support those who seek to achieve other reforms in the practice of criminal punishment.

Kentucky Criminal Law Experts Call For Reform, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this article for Bench & Bar Magazine (the Kentucky Bar Association's magazine), Professor Cortney Lollar discusses the Second Annual Forum on Criminal Law in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Murder, Minority, Victims, And Mercy, Aya Gruber

University of Colorado Law Review

Should the jury have acquitted George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin's murder? Should enraged husbands receive a pass for killing their cheating wives? Should the law treat a homosexual advance as adequate provocation for killing? Criminal law scholars generally answer these questions with a resounding "no." Theorists argue that criminal laws should not reflect bigoted perceptions of African Americans, women, and gays by permitting judges and jurors to treat those who kill racial and gender minorities with undue mercy. According to this view, murder defenses like provocation should be restricted to ensure that those who kill minority victims receive the harshest …

The Hanging Judge By Michael A. Ponsor––Capital Punishment: Is The Death Penalty Worth The Price?, Beth D. Cohen, Pat K. Newcombe

Cleveland State Law Review

No abstract provided.

Executing Whiteness: Fictional And Nonfictional Accounts Of Capital Punishment In The United States, 1915-1940, Daniel Lachance

Studio for Law and Culture

Over the course of the nineteenth century, elites in the United States increasingly sought to privatize executions and rationalize execution protocols. The source of this change is well known to historians of punishment: a fear that public executions had become unwieldy spectacles drove state actors to move these events into jail yards, at first, and then, with the advent of new technologies, into the interior of centralized prisons that were often far from the county in which the crime had occurred. The centralization of executions and the rationalization of execution protocols reflected and reinforced a more bureaucratic image of the …

Life And Death In Kentucky: Past, Present, And Future, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article provides a historical survey of capital punishment in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, paying particular attention to gender and race. The author concludes that given the lack of recent executions that it is perhaps time to make legislative changes to the Commonwealth’s death penalty practice.

Getting Jurors To Awesome, Cortney E. Lollar

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A 2011 American Bar Association report on the death penalty in Kentucky revealed that a shocking two-thirds of the 78 people sentenced to death in Kentucky since reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 have had their sentences overturned on appeal. Kentucky’s reversal rate is more than twice the national average, with a 31% reversal rate in capital cases and almost four times the 17% national reversal rate in all other case types. With a sentence as irreversible as death, troubling does not begin to describe the depth of concern many experience when viewing such a startling statistic.

A closer …

Lethal Injection Chaos Post-Baze, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

In 2008, with Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court broke decades of silence regarding state execution methods to declare Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol constitutional, yet the opinion itself did not offer much guidance. In the six years after Baze, legal challenges to lethal injection soared as states scrambled to quell litigation by modifying their lethal injection protocols. My unprecedented study of over 300 cases citing Baze reveals that such modifications have occurred with alarming frequency. Moreover, even as states purportedly rely on the Baze opinion, they have changed their lethal injection protocols in inconsistent ways that bear little …

Rate Of False Conviction Of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced To Death, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien, Chen Hu, Edward H. Kennedy

Articles

The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to …

Foreword: The Death Penalty In Decline: From Colonial America To The Present, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article traces the history of capital punishment in America. It describes the death penalty's curtailment in colonial Pennsylvania by William Penn, and the substantial influence of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria -- the first Enlightenment thinker to advocate the abolition of executions -- on the Founding Fathers' views. The Article also describes the transition away from "sanguinary" laws and punishments toward the "penitentiary system" and highlights the U.S. penal system's abandonment of non-lethal corporal punishments.

Murder, Minority Victims, And Mercy, Aya Gruber

Publications

Should the jury have acquitted George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin's murder? Should enraged husbands receive a pass for killing their cheating wives? Should the law treat a homosexual advance as adequate provocation for killing? Criminal law scholars generally answer these questions with a resounding "no." Theorists argue that criminal laws should not reflect bigoted perceptions of African Americans, women, and gays by permitting judges and jurors to treat those who kill racial and gender minorities with undue mercy. According to this view, murder defenses like provocation should be restricted to ensure that those who kill minority victims receive the harshest …

Flawed Forensics And The Death Penalty: Junk Science And Potentially Wrongful Executions, Jessica Dwyer-Moss

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

A Historical Comparative Analysis Of Executions In The United States From 1608 To 2009, Emily Jean Abili

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The death penalty has been a contested issue throughout American history. The United States has been executing offenders since Jamestown became a colony in 1608 (Allen & Clubb, 2008). Since that time, many issues have been raised about the death penalty including whether or not it is moral, discriminatory, or a deterrent.

This study examines the history of executions, including lynchings, in the United States from 1608 to 2009 using a variety of sociological theories on law and society. Some of the research questions that guide this project are:

* What is the nature of change in the relative prevalence …

Physician Participation In Executions, The Morality Of Capital Punishment, And The Practical Implications Of Their Relationship, Paul J. Litton

Faculty Publications

Evidence that some executed prisoners suffered excruciating pain has reinvigorated the ethical debate about physician participation in lethal injections. In widely publicized litigation, death row inmates argue that the participation of anesthesiologists in their execution is constitutionally required to minimize the risk of unnecessary suffering. For many years, commentators supported the ethical ban on physician participation reflected in codes of professional medical organizations. However, a recent wave of scholarship concurs with inmate advocates, urging the law to require or at least permit physician participation.

An Analysis Of The Death Penalty Jurisprudence Of The October 2007 Supreme Court Term, Richard Klein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Procedure Decisions From The October 2007 Term, Susan N. Herman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Opinion: A Two-Part State Supreme Court, Stanley Mosk

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Thompson V. Oklahoma: Debating The Constitutionality Of Juvenile Executions, Susan M. Simmons

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

More Than A "Quick Glimpse Of The Life": The Relationship Between Victim Impact Evidence And Death Sentencing, Jerome E. Deise, Raymond Paternoster

Faculty Scholarship

In striking down the use of victim impact evidence (VIE) during the penalty phase of a capital trial, the Supreme Court in Booth v. Maryland and South Carolina v. Gathers argued that such testimony would appeal to the emotions of jurors with the consequence that death sentences would not be based upon a reasoned consideration of the blameworthiness of the offender. After a change in personnel, the Court overturned both decisions in Payne v. Tennessee, decided just two years after Gathers. The majority in Payne were decidedly less concerned with the emotional appeal of VIE, arguing that it would only …

Courts Of Appeal And Colonialism In The British Caribbean: A Case For The Caribbean Court Of Justice, Ezekiel Rediker

Michigan Journal of International Law

In recent years, a public debate on law and the colonial legacy has engaged people of all walks of life in the English Speaking Caribbean (ESC), from judges and politicians to young people in the streets. Throughout the ESC, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC)—based in London and composed of British jurists—has been the highest court of appeal since the colonial era. In the past decade, however, Caribbean governments have sought greater control over their legal systems. In 2005, they created the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to supplant the British Privy Council as the Supreme Court for …

Death And Rehabilitation, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

While rehabilitation is reemerging as an important penological goal, the Supreme Court is eroding the long-revered divide between capital and non-capital sentences. This raises the question of whether and how rehabilitation applies in the capital context. Courts and scholars have long concluded that it does not — that death is completely irrelevant to rehabilitation. Yet, historically, the death penalty in this country has been imposed in large part to induce the rehabilitation of offenders’ characters. Additionally, there are tales of the worst offenders transforming their characters when they are facing death, and several legal doctrines are based on the idea …

Becker And Foucault On Crime And Punishment – A Conversation With Gary Becker, François Ewald, And Bernard Harcourt: The Second Session, Gary S. Becker, Francois Ewald, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault discussed and analyzed Gary Becker’s economic theory of crime and punishment, originally published in The Journal of Political Economy in 1968 under the title “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach.” In this historic, second encounter at the University of Chicago, Gary Becker responds to Foucault’s lectures and possible critical readings of his writings on crime and punishment, in conversation with Professors François Ewald (who was, at the time in 1979, Foucault’s assistant at the Collège and one of Foucault’s closest interlocutors) and Bernard Harcourt (a …

What Real-World Criminal Cases Tell Us About Genetics Evidence, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article, which is part of a symposium on "Law and Ethics at the Frontier of Genetic Technology," examines an unprecedented experimental study published in Science. The Science study indicated that psychopathic criminal offenders were more likely to receive lighter sentences if a judge was aware of genetic and neurobiological explanations for the offender’s psychopathy. This Article contends that the study’s conclusions derive from substantial flaws in the study’s design and methodology. The hypothetical case upon which the study is based captures just one narrow and unrepresentative component of how genetic and neurobiological information operates, and the study suffers from …

The Case Against The Case Against The Death Penalty, Chad W. Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

Despite the continuing belief by a majority of Americans that the death penalty is morally permissible, the death penalty has few academic defenders. This lack of academic defenders is puzzling because of the strong philosophical justification the death penalty finds in traditional theories of punishment. The three major theories of punishment (the deterrent, the retributive, and the rehabilitative), far from showing that the death penalty is not justified, tend to provide good reasons to favor the death penalty. Indeed, every attempt to show that the major theories of punishment rule out the death penalty either involves smuggling in other assumptions …

The Virtues Of Thinking Small, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Professor Lain argues that, in efforts to determine how close American states are to abolishing the death penalty, scholars should "think small," examining the ground level issues that affect its imposition. Among the issues she explores are exonerations of defendants, the legality and obtainability of lethal injection drugs, and the high costs of seeking and imposing capital punishment.

Motivation Matters: Guideline 10.13 And Other Mechanisms For Preventing Lawyers From Surrendering To Self-Interest In Responding To Allegations Of Ineffective Assistance In Death Penalty Cases, Tigran W. Eldred

Faculty Scholarship

Defense lawyers whose clients are sentenced to death are virtually guaranteed to be accused of ineffective assistance of counsel. The question is how they will respond. On one hand, lawyers alleged to be ineffective are obligated under Guideline 10.13 of the American Bar Association’s Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases to continue to safeguard the interests of their former clients, a duty that includes full cooperation in appropriate legal strategies chosen to pursue the ineffectiveness claim. On the other hand, lawyers who are accused of ineffectiveness often react defensively to the allegation, reflexively …

Plea Bargaining And The Right To The Effective Assistance Of Counsel: Where The Rubber Hits The Road In Capital Cases, John H. Blume

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.