Recent Legal Developments

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-546
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Ruibin Lu
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Exclusionary Rule ◽  
The U.S

In this article, we review and analyze the criminal justice–related decisions of the 2015 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. We also provide a summary of the Court’s voting patterns and opine authorship. Twenty-two of the Court’s 76 decisions touched on criminal justice. There were significant decisions involving the exclusionary rule, search incident to arrest, the death penalty, and sentencing.

The Execution of Wallace Wilkerson

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Acker ◽  
Ryan Champagne
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
Firing Squad ◽  
Lethal Injection ◽  
The U.S

Wallace Wilkerson was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1879 after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of his sentence. Shots from the marksmen’s rifles missed his heart. Not strapped into the chair where he had been seated, Wilkerson lurched onto the ground and exclaimed, “My God!…They missed it!” He groaned, continued breathing, and was pronounced dead some 27 min later. Relying on contemporaneous news accounts and legal documents, this article describes Wilkerson’s crime, the judicial decisions upholding his death sentence, and his execution. It next examines ensuing methods of capital punishment from the electric chair through lethal injection and notes persistent gaps between principle and practice in the continuing quest for increasingly humane modes of execution. The article concludes by suggesting that Wilkerson’s botched firing squad execution harbingered difficulties which continue to plague capital punishment. The implications for the future of the death penalty—a long-standing and resilient practice in American criminal justice—and the ultimate legacy of Wallace Wilkerson remain uncertain, although starkly evident is the daunting and perhaps impossible challenge of reconciling the paradox inherent in the concept of a “humane execution.”

Recent Legal Developments

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-215
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Wesley McCann
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
The U.S

In this article, we review and analyze the criminal justice–related decisions of the 2016 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. We also provide a summary of the Court’s voting patterns and opine authorship. Twenty-two of the Court’s 69 opinions touched on criminal justice. There were significant decisions involving the Fourth Amendment, the death penalty, and sentencing.

An Angle of Vision

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Edward A. Jr. Purcell
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Personal Values ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
True Nature ◽  
The U.S

This chapter discusses the variety of types of cases Justice Antonin Scalia heard on the U.S. Supreme Court and notes their variety as well as the fact that in a few areas Scalia took originalist positions that brought results commonly regarded as “liberal,” such as his interpretation of the Confrontation Clause. The chapter then turns to the bulk of the cases where he supported “conservative” results. It points out that he used his originalist jurisprudence vigorously to defend certain positions that involved his own most intensely held personal values (those dealing with abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty, and assisted suicide), and it suggests that his originalism may have been designed to justify his views on those issues. The chapter then suggests that the true test of his jurisprudence and methodology lay not in his actions in those cases but rather in the more general run of cases where he applied his jurisprudential principles inconsistently, failed to apply them at all, or actually rejected them. That large and final category of cases constituted the majority of his decisions and opinions, the chapter argues, and it provides the best ground for testing his jurisprudential claims and ultimately identifying the true nature of his jurisprudence and the significance of his judicial career.

Recent Legal Developments: Criminal Justice Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, 2018 Term

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Elizabeth Dotson ◽  
Mary Miller
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The U.S

In this article, we review and analyze the criminal justice–related decisions of the 2018 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. We also provide a summary of the Court’s voting patterns and opinion authorship. Eighteen of the Court’s 72 decisions touched on criminal justice. There were significant decisions involving due process, sentencing, and federal criminal statutes. Each of these is discussed in turn.

A Tribute To Robert H. Jackson – Recalling America's Contributions To International Criminal Justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 355-363
Author(s):  
Chile Eboe-Osuji
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
The U.S

It is an immense honor to be here. But the honor is special indeed; because it was around this time seventy-four years ago—more precisely on April 13, 1945—that Robert H. Jackson (as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) addressed this same gathering, in a classic speech titled “Rule of Law Among Nations.”

Examination of Decision Making and Botched Lethal Injection Executions in Texas

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (12) ◽  
pp. 1715-1732
Author(s):  
Talia Roitberg Harmon ◽  
Michael Cassidy ◽  
Richelle Kloch
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Single Drug ◽  
Lethal Injection ◽  
Injection Protocol ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Analyze Data

This research examines the influence of lethal injection drug shortages on Texas criminal justice officials’ decision to change the state’s three-drug lethal injection protocol to the use of pentobarbital as a single drug protocol, without judicial oversight. We analyze data collected under the three- and one-drug protocols from 1982 through 2020 and compare differences in the length of time the lethal injection took, and complications reported by media witnesses. Findings suggest a higher rate of botched executions under the one-drug protocol than the three-drug protocol. We discuss the role compounding pharmacies may play in our results, the impact of this work on the U.S. Supreme Court’s death penalty jurisprudence, and implications concerning the unilateral decision making by Texas state officials.

scholarly journals Revisiting Death's Difference: The Philosophical Anthropology of the U.S. Death Penalty and the Impossibility of Capital Due Process

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-208
Author(s):  
G.P. Marcar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
The U.S

AbstractWithin the United States, legal challenges to the death penalty have held it to be a “cruel and unusual” punishment (contrary to the Eighth Amendment) or arbitrarily and unfairly enacted (contrary to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). The Eighth Amendment requires that punishments not be disproportionate or purposeless. In recent rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has adopted a piecemeal approach to this matter. In regard to particular classes of defendant, the Court has sought to rule on whether death is likely to be a proportional and purposeful punishment, as well as whether—given the condition of these defendants—such a determination can be reliably and accurately gauged. This article will suggest a different approach. Instead of asking whether, given the nature of certain categories of human defendant, the death penalty is constitutional in their case, I will begin by asking what—given the nature of the U.S. death penalty—one must believe about human beings for death to be a proportionate punishment. From this, I will argue that to believe that these penal goals are capable of fulfilment by the death penalty entails commitment to an empirically unconfirmable philosophical anthropology. On this basis, it will be further argued that the beliefs required for the U.S. death penalty's proportional and purposeful instigation (pursuant to the Eighth Amendment) are not congruent with the demands of legal due process.

scholarly journals Litigating in the Shadow of Innocence

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Supreme Court

In 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States, allowing optimism to trump experience, accepted various states’ assurances that new death penalty procedures the states had then recently adopted would avoid the vices that had led the Court to strike down the death penalty in 1972. Now, some thirty years later, a body of evidence has developed demonstrating that this experiment has failed—that the problems of arbitrariness, racism and propensity to error are endemic to the criminal justice system (particularly with regard to capital punishment) and cannot be cured by what Justice Blackmun called “tinker[ing] with the machinery of death.” Despite the Court’s best intentions, the death penalty procedures of the 1980s and 1990s and the first half of this decade reflect little if any significant improvement over the condemned pre-1972 systems.

Criminal justice and penal populism in Ireland

Legal Studies ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Policy ◽  
Exclusionary Rule ◽  
The Supreme Court

In constructing criminal policy the Irish legislature seems to be driven predominantly by a pragmatic and populist approach, in contrast to the rights-oriented jurisprudence of the Supreme Court. This paper describes the conflict between the courts and the legislature in relation to criminal justice matters in Ireland, particularly in the context of bail, the exclusionary rule and sentencing, and analyses the reasons for this divergence, drawing on the concept of penal populism. Although the Irish courts serve as a valuable bulwark against punitive populist policies, this paper considers if this failure to adhere to the desires of the legislature and to public opinion is anti-democratic. Furthermore, in assessing the apparent rift between the two arms of the Irish State, this paper highlights areas of criminal justice in which this conceptualisation of the legislature as punitive and the courts as rights-enforcing is unduly simplistic and possibly inaccurate.

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