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 cas­es could effec­tive­ly end the death penal­ty in the state. He not­ed, ​“The delays in…

“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 pub­lic to re-exam­ine the death penal­ty, but he cau­tions that…

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, ​“Investigating Racial Profiling by the Miami-Dade Police Department: A Multimedia Approach” by Geoffrey…

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:

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.

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 Innocence and Law Reviews.

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 recent­ly been a marked increase in the use of the…

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:

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 relat­ed to Catholic jurors by Gerald Uelmen. (Symposium, 44 Journal…

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.