Fact Suppression and the Subversion of Capital Punishment: What Death Penalty Foes on the Supreme Court and in the Media Do Not Want the Public to Know

Forty Years of Death: The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty in South Carolina (Still Arbitrary after All These Years)

10.31228/osf.io/h6ajv ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

John H. Blume ◽

Lyndsey S. Vann

Keyword(s):

South Carolina ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Gender Bias ◽

Death Penalty ◽

Capital Punishment ◽

The United States ◽

The Past ◽

The Supreme Court ◽

And Gender ◽

Looking Back

11 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 183 (2016)Forty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States deemed constitutional new death penalty laws intended to minimize the arbitrariness which led the Court to invalidate all capital sentencing statutes four years earlier in Furman v. Georgia. Over the last four decades the Court has — time and again — attempted to regulate the “machinery of death.” Looking back over the Court’s work, many observers, including two current Supreme Court justices, have questioned whether the modern death penalty has lived up to expectations set by the Court in the 1970s or if, despite 40 years of labor, the American death penalty continues to be administered in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. This Article presents data from South Carolina’s forty-year experiment with capital punishment and concludes that the administration of the death penalty in that state is still riddled with error and infected with racial and gender bias. It is — in short — still arbitrary after all these years. The authors maintain that the only true cure it to abolish South Carolina’s death penalty, although they do argue that lesser steps including additional safeguards and procedure may limit, but will not eliminate, some of the arbitrariness and bias which are present in the current imposition of South Carolina’s most extreme punishment.

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Litigating in the Shadow of Innocence

University of Pittsburgh Law Review ◽

10.5195/lawreview.2006.94 ◽

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.

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Capital Punishment Jurisprudence: A Critical Assessment of the Supreme Court of Uganda's Judgment in Attorney General v Susan Kigula and 417 Others

Journal of African Law ◽

10.1017/s0021855311000131 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 55 (2) ◽

pp. 261-279 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Barrie Sander

Keyword(s):

Supreme Court ◽

Death Penalty ◽

Capital Punishment ◽

Attorney General ◽

Critical Assessment ◽

International Courts ◽

International Trends ◽

The Supreme Court ◽

Degrading Treatment ◽

The Relationship

AbstractThe Ugandan Supreme Court's decision in Attorney General v Susan Kigula & 417 Others ended a ten year constitutional challenge against capital punishment. The attorney general was appealing the Constitutional Court's declarations that a mandatory death penalty and a delay on death row of more than three years violate Uganda's Constitution. The respondents cross-appealed the Constitutional Court's declarations that the death penalty is constitutional and that hanging is an appropriate and therefore constitutional method of execution. The Supreme Court dismissed both the appeals and cross-appeals. This article summarises the Supreme Court's findings and analyses the court's reasoning. It demonstrates that, while the court's reasoning is generally in line with the interpretations offered by international courts and human rights bodies, the court arguably missed an opportunity to take a bolder approach regarding the relationship between the death penalty and the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, particularly in light of recent international trends.

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Criminalizing Unto Death as Act of Judgment, Act of War: The Suicidal Rationality of the Death Penalty

Law Culture and the Humanities ◽

10.1177/17438721211043231 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 174387212110432

Author(s):

Rahul Govind

Keyword(s):

Supreme Court ◽

Death Penalty ◽

Capital Punishment ◽

Common Ground ◽

Fundamental Problem ◽

The Supreme Court ◽

Canonical Texts ◽

Operational Logic

This paper attempts to establish that capital punishment is not rational and cannot be rationalized without suicidally destroying the very ground on which lawful and rational punishment bases itself. It argues that in capital punishment, just as in any lawful punishment, the criminal is both held (humanly) rational and therefore culpable. But, unlike other forms of punishment, in capital punishment, the condemned is at the same time, held as irrational and irredeemable, beyond reform, and therein outside the ambit of rationality and humanity. In this sense a fundamental aporia is reached in rationalizing capital punishment because of the contradiction between the basis of punishment (the human as rational) and its operational logic (the condemned person as beyond reform therein irrational). Expressed another way, the judge proclaims a form of infallibility in their reasoning where the incorrigibility of the judgment is horrifically demonstrated and ironically reflected (and projected) in the incorrigibility of the condemned. This broad argument is pursued in two parts; one part interprets canonical texts such as Hobbes, Hegel and Foucault, while the second part interprets the Supreme Court of India’s jurisprudence around the death penalty. While these are very different discourses it will be shown that they share much common ground in their expressing—and negotiating—the fundamental problem as described above.

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Coming into focus: an examination of how political actors and media outlets in Canada framed the Chaoulli v. Quebec case.

10.32920/ryerson.14647692 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Trevor Snyder

Keyword(s):

Supreme Court ◽

Media Coverage ◽

News Frames ◽

Human Interest ◽

Political Actors ◽

The Public ◽

The Supreme Court ◽

The Media ◽

Issue Frames ◽

Court Hearing

"This paper presents the findings of a study that examined how different political actors and the media presented the Chaoulli v. Quebec case to public. As should be clear, the Chaoulli v. Quebec case was both an extremely important case and an extremely complicated one. As a result, it is important to understand how it was presented to the public. The study was conducted in two parts. First, the specific issues frames expressed by political actors at the Supreme Court hearing were identified and mapped. This was done by examining the transcripts and factums from the hearing and noting the different problem definitions, causal interpretations, suggested remedies, and moral appeals expressed by political actors there (Entman 1993). This review revealed that three distinct specific issues frames were put forth during the hearing by three distinct sets of actors. Next, media coverage of the case was examined. Specifically, media coverage in the Toronto Star, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, and the Ottawa Citizen was examined from the day the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case until six-months after the Supreme Court announced its ruling. Using content analysis, this part of the study identified (1) the presence or absence of the specific issue frames identified in the first part of the study; (2) the type of generic news frames (e.g. the Human Interest Frame) (Semetko and Valkenburg, 2000) used to present the case, and (3) which political actors were directly quoted in coverage of the case."--Page 4.

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Coming into focus: an examination of how political actors and media outlets in Canada framed the Chaoulli v. Quebec case.

10.32920/ryerson.14647692.v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Trevor Snyder

Keyword(s):

Supreme Court ◽

Media Coverage ◽

News Frames ◽

Human Interest ◽

Political Actors ◽

The Public ◽

The Supreme Court ◽

The Media ◽

Issue Frames ◽

Court Hearing

"This paper presents the findings of a study that examined how different political actors and the media presented the Chaoulli v. Quebec case to public. As should be clear, the Chaoulli v. Quebec case was both an extremely important case and an extremely complicated one. As a result, it is important to understand how it was presented to the public. The study was conducted in two parts. First, the specific issues frames expressed by political actors at the Supreme Court hearing were identified and mapped. This was done by examining the transcripts and factums from the hearing and noting the different problem definitions, causal interpretations, suggested remedies, and moral appeals expressed by political actors there (Entman 1993). This review revealed that three distinct specific issues frames were put forth during the hearing by three distinct sets of actors. Next, media coverage of the case was examined. Specifically, media coverage in the Toronto Star, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, and the Ottawa Citizen was examined from the day the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case until six-months after the Supreme Court announced its ruling. Using content analysis, this part of the study identified (1) the presence or absence of the specific issue frames identified in the first part of the study; (2) the type of generic news frames (e.g. the Human Interest Frame) (Semetko and Valkenburg, 2000) used to present the case, and (3) which political actors were directly quoted in coverage of the case."--Page 4.

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