Entries tagged with “McCleskey v. Kemp”
Issues
Feb 17, 2023
LAW REVIEWS: Ensuring Black Lives Matter When the Penalty Is Death
In a 2022 article published in the Idaho Journal of Critical Legal Studies, author Sidney Balman (pictured), examines the relationship between racism and geographical arbitrariness in the application of the death penalty in the U.S. As in other areas of society, he finds that Black lives are not valued equally with others. He cites the Supreme Court’s decision in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) as the main legal obstacle to reversing this bias affecting capital punishment. “Today,” he writes…
Issues
May 11, 2022
New DPIC Podcast: 35 Years After Controversial Supreme Court Decision, Prof. Alexis Hoag Discusses McCleskey v. Kemp’s Legacy
In the May 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Professor Alexis Hoag (pictured) of Brooklyn Law School joined DPIC Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue for a wide-ranging conversation marking the 35th anniversary of McCleskey v. Kemp, a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rejected a constitutional challenge to the death penalty that showed strong statistical evidence of racial disparities in capital prosecutions and death sentences. Professor Hoag, formerly an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense…
Issues
Apr 21, 2022
35 Years After McCleskey v. Kemp: A Legacy of Racial Injustice in the Administration of the Death Penalty
On April 22, 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that the same types of statistical data that were routinely accepted as proof of racial discrimination in housing, employment, education, and the denial of other civil rights were not sufficient as proof that a death sentence had been unconstitutionally imposed. Although Warren McCleskey had presented a sophisticated statistical analysis of data from more than 2,500 murder cases in Georgia that showed that…
Issues
Jun 26, 2020
Law Reviews — Valuing Black Lives: A Case for Ending the Death Penalty
“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. Hoag’s article, Valuing Black Lives: A Case for Ending the Death Penalty was published in connection with the…