Peculiarities of the Application of the Death Penalty in the U.S. in the Context of Racial Discrimination

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktor Shestak ◽  
Victoria Goncharova
2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 862-869 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanhe Jiang ◽  
Eric G. Lambert ◽  
Jin Wang ◽  
Toyoji Saito ◽  
Rebecca Pilot

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Skop ◽  
Wei Li

AbstractIn recent years, the migration rates from both China and India to the U.S. have accelerated. Since 2000 more than a third of foreign-born Chinese and 40% of foreign-born Indians have arrived in that country. This paper will document the evolving patterns of immigration from China and India to the U.S. by tracing the history of immigration and racial discrimination, the dramatic transitions that have occurred since the mid-20th century, and the current demographic and socioeconomic profiles of these two migrant groups.


Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 150-184
Author(s):  
David Wills

A different appropriation of the instant takes place in the case of extrajudicial killing by drones. That practice by the U.S., begun in 2002, has remained shrouded in secrecy. However one counts the victims, drone executions outnumber by a huge margin American judicial executions, and the drone penalty thus represents a particular paradigm of the American death penalty: for the most part out of sight and out of mind. It raises in turn questions about American democracy and the deadly criminal conduct of its foreign policy, but also produces a perspective that brings into focus the long series of historical relations between slavery and the death penalty, as well as lynching and the persistence of racism in the application of capital punishment. Furthermore, the sovereign secrecy of drone attacks produces a structural space shared by the U.S. president and the terrorist s/he attacks.


Author(s):  
Cliff Sloan ◽  
Lauryn Fraas

This chapter introduces the reader to key cases analyzing claims of intellectual disability, describes the current clinical definition and diagnosis, and provides an overview of recurring issues in capital litigation. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individuals with intellectual disability may not be executed. The Court subsequently clarified that current medical standards must be used in assessing claims of intellectual disability in capital cases. The clinical diagnosis requires assessing three factors: (a) deficits in intellectual functioning; (b) deficits in adaptive behavior; and (c) the onset of deficits during the developmental period. Courts must be informed by current medical standards regarding issues that arise, including the standard error of measurement in IQ scores, the problems of offsetting weaknesses in adaptive behavior with perceived strengths, and other clinical topics. The principle that the death penalty must not be imposed on individuals with intellectual disability signals important responsibilities for social work practitioners.


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.


Author(s):  
Russell Stetler

This chapter discusses how the theory and practice of mitigation have evolved over more than four decades, thereby helping to define the modern death penalty era in the United States. Prior to 1976, juries generally made death penalty decisions in a unitary proceeding. Juries then had unfettered discretion to impose death sentences, and the results were so arbitrary that in 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all the existing death penalty statutes. In 1976, the Court approved new statutes that guided jurors’ discretion. The Court required individualized sentencing in which jurors could consider mitigating factors based on the diverse frailties of humankind. This broad definition of what might inspire juries to reject death was elaborated in succeeding decades in a series of decisions relying on the Eighth Amendment. Social workers and other nonlawyers became critical members of multidisciplinary capital defense teams providing effective representation under the Sixth Amendment.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 179-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bodansky

Customary international law often seems like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. According to Manley O. Hudson, even the drafters of the International Court of Justice Statute “had no very clear idea as to what constituted international custom.” The situation has not changed much since then.I got my first taste of the difficulties in identifying custom when I was a junior attorney at the U.S. Department of State and was assigned the task of preparing the U.S. submission in a juvenile death penalty case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The juvenile death penalty is prohibited by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the American Convention on Human Rights, but the question in the Inter-American Commission case was whether it is also prohibited as a matter of customary international law.


2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. 1431-1447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morag Goodwin

North Carolina has, like most American states, played its (not always positive) part in the struggle against what Clinton, back in 1997 when the U.S. had more domestic concerns on its mind, called “America's constant curse”. But racial discrimination is not, of course, simply America's curse. Europe, for all its self-righteousness of late, has certainly not escaped it. Despite the prevalence of racial discrimination right across the geographic expression of Europe, this paper shall concentrate on a particular set of countries – those termed Central and Eastern Europe – and on a particular group – the Roma, widely acknowledged as the most marginalised and discriminated in Europe today.


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