Law Reviews

“States still oper­at­ing a cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem are inca­pable of admin­is­ter­ing the death penal­ty free from racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and arbi­trari­ness.” So argues Alexis Hoag (pic­tured), Practitioner in Residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University, in an arti­cle in the Spring 2020 issue of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

Judicial enforce­ment of con­sti­tu­tion­al rights in Texas death penal­ty cas­es has become increas­ing­ly rare and is vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent in the state’s fed­er­al courts, a new University of Houston Law Center study has found. The study, Reversal Rates in Capital Cases in Texas, 2000 – 2020, pub­lished online on April 27, 2020 in the UCLA Law Review, reports that rever­sal rates in cas­es in which Texas cap­i­tal defen­dants were sen­tenced to death in the first two decades of the 21^st cen­tu­ry have plum­met­ed in com­par­i­son to grants of relief in ear­li­er cases.

At least 99 men and one woman are on death row in eight U.S. states, con­demned to death by judges with­out the pri­or autho­riza­tion of a jury, accord­ing to a 2019 study by researchers Michael Radelet and Ben Cohen (pic­tured) pub­lished in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Another 18 pris­on­ers sen­tenced to death since the resump­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the U.S. in the 1970s, the study shows, have been exe­cut­ed after judges dis­re­gard­ed or over­rode jury votes in favor of life.

At least 166 wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed death-row pris­on­ers have been exon­er­at­ed since the death penal­ty was rein­sti­tut­ed in the United States in 1973. That num­ber, how­ev­er, may only scratch the sur­face in assess­ing the degree to which inno­cent men and women are being sent to U.S. death rows.

A land­mark arti­cle in the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy pro­vides a ​“com­pi­la­tion of mile­stones in the American expe­ri­ence with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” track­ing more than 400 years of the ​“inglo­ri­ous expe­ri­ence with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” in what is now the United States. Authors Rob Warden (pic­tured, left), Executive Director Emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Daniel Lennard (pic­tured, right), a lawyer at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, tracked more than four cen­turies of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment on what is…

Multiple fac­tors — from declin­ing mur­der rates to the aban­don­ment of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by many rur­al coun­ties and sub­stan­tial­ly reduced usage in out­lier coun­ties that had aggres­sive­ly imposed it in the past — have col­lec­tive­ly led to an ​“aston­ish­ing plunge” in death sen­tences over the last twen­ty years, accord­ing to a new study, Lethal Rejection, pub­lished in the 2017/​2018 Albany Law Review. Using data on death-eli­gi­ble cas­es from 1994, 2004, and 2014, Drake University law pro­fes­sor David McCord and Niagara University crim­i­nal jus­tice pro­fes­sor Talia Roitberg Harmon exam­ined a range of fac­tors to determine…

A new study of more than two decades of mur­ders in Oklahoma has found that defen­dants charged with killing a white woman have odds of being sen­tenced to death in the Sooner State that are near­ly ten times greater than if they had been charged with killing a man who is a racial minority.

Two pro­fes­sors of soci­ol­o­gy and crim­i­nol­o­gy who reviewed more than 1500 cas­es in which con­vict­ed pris­on­ers were lat­er exon­er­at­ed have found a direct rela­tion­ship between the seri­ous­ness of the crime and mis­car­riages of jus­tice: ​“the ​‘worst of the worst crimes,’” they say, ​“pro­duce the ​‘worst of the worst evi­dence.’ ” In their research — report­ed in the law review arti­cle, The Worst of the Worst: Heinous Crimes and Erroneous Evidence—University of Denver pro­fes­sors Scott Phillips (pic­tured) and Jamie Richardson found that ​“as the seri­ous­ness of a crime increas­es, so too does the chance…

In a new arti­cle for the Lewis & Clark Law Review, author Carla Edmondson argues that the future dan­ger­ous­ness inquiry that is implic­it in cap­i­tal setenc­ing deter­mi­na­tions ​“is a fun­da­men­tal­ly flawed ques­tion that leads to arbi­trary and capri­cious death sen­tences” and because of the ​“per­sis­tent influ­ence of future dan­ger­ous­ness … ren­ders the death penal­ty incom­pat­i­ble with the pro­hi­bi­tions of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments on cru­el and unusu­al punishment.”

Two recent stud­ies exam­in­ing the effects of Batson v. Kentucky found that, despite the Supreme Court’s ban on racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in jury selec­tion, Black jurors con­tin­ue to be dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly removed from jury pools in North and South Carolina.