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

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.

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.

Methodological and Procedural Considerations

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
John R. Barner
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Helping Professions ◽  
Clinical Criteria ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Legal Precedent ◽  
Judicial Scrutiny ◽  
Rights Issues

This chapter addresses the methodological and procedural aspects of capital litigation. Through a historical and chronological review of legal precedent and procedural changes to capital litigation, it addresses the legacy of change and highlights the era when, due to the Supreme Court decisions in Furman v. Georgia (1972) and Gregg v. Georgia (1976), a moratorium on the death penalty was issued and the constitutionality of capital punishment was under direct judicial scrutiny nationwide. Additional attention is paid to post-Gregg decisions that have transformed capital procedure, limited or expanded its scope, or changed the legal, social, or clinical criteria upon which capital decisions can be based. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the human rights issues brought up by capital punishment in the United States, as well as implications for social workers and other helping professions working within the capital context.

States versus Nation, and the Supreme Court

1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver P. Field
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Government ◽  
Federal System ◽  
National State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States has been as impartial an umpire in national-state disputes as one of the members of two contending teams could be expected to be. This is not to impugn the wisdom or the fairness of the Supreme Court, but it is to say that the Supreme Court has been partial to the national government during the past one hundred and forty-four years of our experience with a federal system in the United States. The states, as members of the federal system, have had to play against the umpire as well as against the national government itself. The combination has long been too much for them.

Shouldn't Dead Be Dead?: The Search for a Uniform Definition of Death

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariane Lewis ◽  
Katherine Cahn-Fuller ◽  
Arthur Caplan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Definition Of Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Uniform Definition ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Death By Neurologic Criteria ◽  
The Way

In 1968, the definition of death in the United States was expanded to include not just death by cardiopulmonary criteria, but also death by neurologic criteria. We explore the way the definition has been modified by the medical and legal communities over the past 50 years and address the medical, legal and ethical controversies associated with the definition at present, with a particular highlight on the Supreme Court of Nevada Case of Aden Hailu.

Constitutional Law in 1941–1942: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1941

1943 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-289
Author(s):  
Robert E. Cushman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Decisions

The vacancies on the Supreme Court caused by the retirement of Mr. Justice McReynolds and Chief Justice Hughes were filled by President Roosevelt during the summer of 1941. When the Court convened in October, Mr. Justice Stone, originally appointed by President Coolidge, became Chief Justice. Chief Justice White was the only other associate justice to be promoted to the Chief Justiceship. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, and Attorney General Robert H. Jackson of New York took their seats as associate justices. Thus seven justices have been placed on the Court by President Roosevelt. Any idea, however, that these Roosevelt appointees conform to any uniform pattern of thought is belied by the fact that in the 75 cases in the 1941 term turning on important questions of either constitutional law or federal statutory construction, there were dissents in 36, and 23 of these dissents were by either three or four justices. No act of Congress has been declared unconstitutional since May, 1936, when the Municipal Bankruptcy Act was held invalid. Since 1937, the Court has overruled 20 previous decisions, mentioning them by name, while it has modified or qualified a number of others.

The Right of Appeal in Naturalization Cases in the Federal Courts

1927 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry B. Hazard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

The Supreme Court of the United States, by Mr. Justice Brandeis, recently handed down its decision in Tutun v. United States, and Neuberger v. United States. This is the latest of the important Supreme Court cases determining the law of naturalization, of citizenship, and of expatriation. During the past fifteen years they have comprised Johannessen v. United States, Mansour v. United States, Luria v. United States, Maibaum v. United States, Mackenzie v. Hare, United States v. Ginsberg, United States v. Ness, United States v. Morena, Ozawa v. United States, Yamashita v. Hinkle, United States v. Thind, Kaplan v. Tod, and Toyota v. United States.

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