Law Reviews

The Tennessee Law Review recent­ly pub­lished a com­pi­la­tion of arti­cles and essays from its col­lo­qui­um, ​“The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty,” held in February 2009. Contributors focused on issues that have influ­enced cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment through­out the course of his­to­ry. An arti­cle by Hugo Adam Bedau, a promi­nent death penal­ty schol­ar, address­es the issues of inno­cence and racial bias in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty. Lyn Entzeroth focus­es on whether men­tal­ly ill defen­dants should be exclud­ed from the death penal­ty, and asks whether states should be allowed…

The Council of the American Law Institute (ALI) recent­ly vot­ed to with­draw a sec­tion of its Model Penal Code con­cerned with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment because of the ​“cur­rent intractable insti­tu­tion­al and struc­tur­al obsta­cles to ensur­ing a min­i­mal­ly ade­quate sys­tem for admin­is­ter­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” The Council based its deci­sion on a study it com­mis­sioned to look into the prac­tice of the death penal­ty since the rec­om­men­da­tions were made in the Model Penal Code. The rec­om­men­da­tions for how to make the death penal­ty less arbi­trary had been adopt­ed in 1962 and were cited…

The University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review recent­ly pub­lished a sym­po­sium issue of Death Penalty Stories, high­light­ing the role of the nar­ra­tive in the defense of death penal­ty cas­es. The com­pi­la­tion includes con­tri­bu­tions from lit­i­ga­tors who have used per­sua­sive nar­ra­tive in sup­port of a life sen­tence. Russell Stetler’s The Unknown Story of a Motherless Child chron­i­cles the case of Edgar H., who was con­vict­ed of killing four men in California. Edgar’s trau­mat­ic child­hood was influ­en­tial in nego­ti­at­ing a sen­tence of life instead of death. Dr. Craig Haney’s arti­cle, On Mitigation…

Professor Ty Alper of the Boalt School of Law at Berkeley has writ­ten an arti­cle for the forth­com­ing edi­tion of the North Carolina Law Review enti­tled ​“The Truth About Physician Participation in Lethal Injection Executions.” Prof. Alper, a not­ed death penal­ty expert, reviews the avail­able research and recent lit­i­ga­tion on the most wide­ly used method of exe­cu­tion in the U.S., focus­ing espe­cial­ly on the poten­tial role of doc­tors in exe­cu­tions. As states are chal­lenged to ensure that inmates do not suf­fer excru­ci­at­ing pain dur­ing lethal injec­tions, Alper con­tends that physician…

A new arti­cle in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science enti­tled ​“Convicting the Innocent” by Prof. Samuel Gross of the Universiry of Michigan Law School explores the rate of false con­vic­tions among death-sen­tenced inmates and exam­ines the demo­graph­i­cal and pro­ce­dur­al pre­dic­tors of such errors. Prof. Gross not­ed that ear­li­er research showed the exon­er­a­tion rate to be 2.3% for inmates who had been on death row at least 15 years and a sim­i­lar rate for those who had been on death row for at least 20 years. He further…

The Tennessee Law Review is host­ing a col­lo­qui­um enti­tled, ​“The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty.” The event will take place February 6 – 7 at the University of Tennessee College of Law in Knoxville and will fea­ture nation­al­ly known experts in this field, includ­ing David Baldus, Hugo Adam Bedau, Stephen Bright, Deborah Denno, Lyn Entzeroth, the Honorable Gilbert S. Merritt, and Penny White. Judge Merritt will deliv­er the keynote address on ​“Why So Much Prosecutorial Error in Death Penalty Cases?” The gath­er­ing will fea­ture a per­for­mance of the play,…

The Texas Tech Law Review​’s lat­est edi­tion is focused on inno­cence and the death penal­ty. Among the arti­cles includ­ed, are, ​“Presumed Guilty: A Death Row Exoneree Shares His Story of Supreme Injustice and Reflections on the Death Penalty,” by Juan Roberto Melendez; ​“Toward a New Paradigm of Criminal Justice: How the Innocence Movement Merges Crime Control and Due Process,” by Keith A. Findley; ​“The Role of the Innocence Argument in Contemporary Death Penalty Debates,” by Michael Radelet; and ​“What Price Justice? The Importance of Costs to Eyewitness Identification Reform,” by…

A new study pub­lished in the Houston Law Review, ​“Racial Disparities in the Capital of Capital Punishment,” explores the rela­tion­ship of race to death sen­tenc­ing in Harris County (Houston), Texas. In the study, Prof. Scott Phillips of the University of Denver explores pat­terns involv­ing the race of both vic­tims and defen­dants, while con­trol­ling for oth­er vari­ables. Phillips con­cludes death sen­tences were more like­ly to be imposed in cas­es with white vic­tims than in those with black vic­tims, and that death sen­tences were more like­ly to be imposed on black defendants…

Professor Bruce Winick of the Miami School of Law has writ­ten an arti­cle argu­ing that the Supreme Court should extend the pro­tec­tion it present­ly offers to those with men­tal retar­da­tion and juve­niles to offend­ers with severe men­tal ill­ness, as well. In The Supreme Court’s Emerging Death Penalty Jurisprudence: Severe Mental Illness as the Next Frontier, Winick reviews the High Court’s analy­sis of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment under the Eighth Amendment with a focus on when the Court has found the death penal­ty dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the crime or for the offend­er. While Winick…