Law Reviews

Arthur L. Alarcon, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit in Los Angeles, sharply criticized California’s death penalty system and chided lawmakers for failing to provide adequate representation and funding for capital cases. Judge Alarcon, a death penalty supporter, wrote an article in the Southern California Law Review entitled “Remedies for California’s Death Row Deadlock” warning that failure to address California’s capital punishment problems and its backlog of…

“Dead Innocent: The Death Penalty Abolitionist Search for a Wrongful Execution” by Professor Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier was recently published in the Tulsa Law Review. The article examines the potential impact that the confirmed execution of an innocent person would have on the U.S. death penalty debate. The author states that identifying those who have been wrongly convicted and later freed — as well as individuals who may have been innocent and executed — provides clear reason for lawmakers and…

The most recent volume of Criminology & Public Policy examines the topic of race and policing. Contributors to this special volume offer timely insights in this controversial area, with most agreeing that more can be done to address the long-standing tension between street officers and communities of color. The articles featured in the journal are “The Importance of Research on Race and Policing: Making Race Salient to Individuals and Institutions Within Criminal Justice” by David A. Harris…

According to the November 2006 edition of the Texas Bar Journal published by the State Bar of Texas, the State Bar has adopted a Texas version of the American Bar Association’s Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases. The introduction to the Texas Guidelines follows: On April 21, 2006, the Board of Directors of the State Bar of Texas adopted the Guidelines and Standards for Texas Capital Counsel. These guidelines and standards articulate the…

A recent article in the Cornell Law Review argues that state death penalty laws that allow the death penalty for the crime of rape of a child where no death occurs may be unconstitutional. Joanna H. D’Avella, NOTE: DEATH ROW FOR CHILD RAPE? CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT UNDER THE ROPER-ATKINS “EVOLVING STANDARDS OF DECENCY” FRAMEWORK, 92 Cornell Law Review 129 (2006) (available at http://organizations.lawschool.cornell.edu/clr/92_1/davella/92 – 1.pdf).

The Fall 2006 edition of the Golden Gate University Law Review contains papers from the recent Symposium entitled “The Faces of Wrongful Conviction” that was held at UCLA in April 2006. The journal includes articles by Simon Cole on fingerprint evidence, by Alexandra Natapoff on the use of snitches, by Craig Haney on expanding beyond innocence when examining injustices in capital cases, and by Thomas Sullivan on the recording of custodial interviews. (37 Golden Gate Law Review 1 (2006)). See…

A recent law review article by Prof. Michael Mannheimer of the Salmon P. Chase College of Law argues that the federal penalty may violate the Eighth Amendment’s proscription against cruel and unusual punishments when it is used in states that do not have the death penalty. Prof. Mannheimer explores the strain of the Eighth Amendment’s history that is specifically concerned with limiting the federal government’s power to interfere with the norms of individual states. He also notes that there has…

A sophisticated statistical study of homicide cases in South Carolina by Professor Isaac Unah of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and attorney Michael Songer found that prosecutors were more likely to seek the death penalty when the victim in the underlying murder was white, if the victim was female, and when the crime occurred in a rural area of the state. The authors first examined the raw data of homicide cases in South Carolina over a 5‑year period and noted: During the 1993…

A recent edition of the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies contains articles from a symposium on “Catholics and the Death Penalty: Lawyers, Jurors & Judges.” In addition to a foreword by Amelia Uelmen and an introduction to Catholic teaching on capital punishment by Art Cody, the volume contains a panel discussion with Kevin Doyle, director of the New York Capital Defender Office, and Charles Hynes, the District Attorney of Kings County (NY). The symposium concludes with a presentation on issues…

A new study examined all cases in which the death penalty was sought in Colorado over a 20-year period, from 1980 to 1999. The study identified 110 death penalty cases, and compared the race and gender of the victims. The authors concluded that the death penalty was most likely to be sought for homicides with white female victims. They also determined that the probability of death being sought was 4.2 times higher for those who killed whites than for those who killed blacks. (Michael Radelet…