Recent Legal Developments

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-215
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Wesley McCann

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.

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Acker ◽  
Ryan Champagne

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.”


2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-546
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Ruibin Lu

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.


Author(s):  
Edward A. Jr. Purcell

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Craig Hemmens ◽  
Elizabeth Dotson ◽  
Mary Miller

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 355-363
Author(s):  
Chile Eboe-Osuji

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.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (12) ◽  
pp. 1715-1732
Author(s):  
Talia Roitberg Harmon ◽  
Michael Cassidy ◽  
Richelle Kloch

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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document