INDEX

The mainstream legal community, including the ABA, has long understood the importance of system-building, but the revised Guidelines state the point especially forcefully. In articulating “the current consensus about what is required to provide effective defense representation in capital cases,” they set high performance standards not just for lawyers, but for death penalty jurisdictions. As the problems are systemic, it is “imperative” that the solutions be.The Guidelines accordingly not only call on governments to deliver capital defense resources that are sufficient in amount, but also furnish the states with a user-friendly blueprint for using those resources wisely to create structures that will function well in the present and evolve effectively over time. This mandate for institution-building is welcome, and the states should lead it. Indeed, they must do so if the Guidelines are to achieve their ameliorative purposes and avoid becoming just a collection of lofty aspirations “‘that palter with us in a double sense, that keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope”.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Legal Representation,

This article gives insight into the different opinions held by the US and Europe in terms of the death penalty. The interplay between terrorism, the death penalty and extradition is also examined.

• Document type Article
• Themes list Extradition, Terrorism,

In general, Muslim nations recognize the validity of the death penalty, and many frequently impose it. According to Amnesty International, between 1985 and mid-1988, Saudi Arabia executed 140 prisoners for the crimes of murder, robbery with violence, drug smuggling or distribution, and adultery. During the same period, Pakistan executed 115, primarily for the crime of murder. Hundreds every year faced the firing squad in Iraq for murder, desertion, treason, sabotage, and economic corruption. At the same time, the Islamic Republic of Iran executed more than 743 inmates for murder, drug crimes, political offenses, prostitution, adultery and other “moral offenses,” including “being corrupt on earth” and “being at enmity with God.” In face of the widespread acceptance of the death penalty within the Muslim world, this essay explores the contours of an Islamic argument against capital punishment. The argument is not, and cannot be, an appeal for the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances. It does call into question, however, the legitimacy – indeed, the legality in accordance with the principles of classical Islamic law, or the Shari’ah – of capital punishment as it is practiced in the era of Islamization.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Iran (Islamic Republic of)
• Themes list Religion , Capital offences, Most Serious Crimes,

American death penalty laws and procedures persistently minimize cases involving female capital offenders. Recognizing some benign explanations for this disparate impact, Professor Streib nonetheless sees the dearth of female death penalty trials, death sentences, and actual executions as signaling sex bias throughout the death penalty system. In this article, he provides data concerning death sentencing and execution patterns and then suggests both substantive and procedural means to address the apparent sex bias. Much more significant, however, is the unique lens for examining the death penalty that is provided by a sex bias analysis. Professor Streib concludes that this perspective unmasks the system’s crime-fighting rhetoric to reveal a macho refuge that masculinizes all who enter therein.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Women,

This article contends that legislatures should adopt measures to assure greater reliability in the eyewitness testimony introduced in capital cases. Erroneous eyewitness identification is one of the most frequent causes of mistaken convictions and executions. Decades ago, the United States Supreme Court crafted due process and right to counsel constitutional doctrines to curb identification procedures that gratuitously enhanced the risk of mistake. While initial interpretations favored a greater judicial role in preventing such abuses, later rulings retreated. Present constitutional rules do not suffice due to the narrowness of their definition and the weakness of the remedial sanctions allotted. The proposed Innocence Protection Act and similar state legislation trust DNA testing to avert mistaken executions. But testing requires biological material that is often not available in capital prosecutions, and so DNA cannot detect all the innocents among those capitally prosecuted. To avert mistaken convictions and executions, legislative reforms need to go beyond DNA, and avert mistakes arising from erroneous eyewitness identifications. Studies show this is one of the most common sources of unjust conviction, and that suchmistakes may well be on the rise. Federal and state legislation should be adopted that provides a stronger curb on suggestive identification practices that gratuitously increase the risk of executing the innocent. The Recommendations for Lineups and Photospreads, developed by the American Psychology/Law Society (AP/LS) in 1998, are an appropriate starting point for legislatures (or state courts exercising their supervisory powers or interpreting state constitutional provisions). Adopting such guidelines will reduce the risk of error in capital cases, with little or no expense borne by the states. Further, to assure that these more reliable procedures will be used during capital case investigations and prosecutions, legislatures and courts should, minimally, adopt an exclusionary rule of the type first announced by the United States Supreme.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996 was drafted, enacted, and signed in an atmosphere of anger and fear. The legislation, which includes substantial cutbacks in the federal habeas corpus remedy, was Congress’s response to the tragedy of the Oklahoma City bombing. During the congressional hearings on the bills that culminated in AEDPA, the proponents of the legislation claimed that its habeas corpus restrictions and other provisions were necessary to fight domestic terrorism. The Senate bill was approved by the House on April 18, 1996, the day before the one-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. President Bill Clinton invoked the bombing in a statement he issued at the time of the Senate’s passage of the legislation and again when he signed the legislation into law. Even at the time of the debates, some courageous legislators were willing to denounce the fallacious connection that the bill’s proponents drew between the bombing and the broader issues of the scope and availability of habeas corpus review. Many of the habeas corpus restrictions ultimately built into AEDPA had been under consideration by Congress since 1990, though none had been adopted. The congressional proponents of these restrictions seized upon the Oklahoma City tragedy as a means of accomplishing their longstanding goal to scale back federal habeas corpus review.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

Mr. Page committed an atrocious crime. He did not know his victim, Peyton Tuthill, a young woman who had recently graduated from college and moved to Denver. But he was in her house, looking for money and items to sell, when she returned from a job interview. Instead of leaving her home, Mr. Page stayed to beat Peyton Tuthill, tie her up, stab her, slit her throat, rape her repeatedly, and eventually, kill her. Clearly, Ms. Tuthill did not deserve to die such a tortured death. Clearly, her death resulted from an egregious crime. However, the answer to the question of whether Mr. Page should be executed for committing this murder is not as clear. Some would answer affirmatively, others negatively. An important question is: who should decide?

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

We assessed the Court’s reformist project on its own terms, asking whether the Court achieved the goals explicit or tolerated, if not invited, the inequalities and capriciousness characteristic of the pre-Furman era. We also argued that, apart from its failure on its own terms, the Supreme Court’s reformist regulation of capital punishment might well have carried an additional unanticipated cost. Whereas abolitionists initially sought judicial regulation of the death penalty as at least a first step towards abolition, judicial reform actually may have helped to stabilize the death penalty as a social practice. We argued that the appearance of intensive regulation of state death penalty practices, notwithstanding its virtual absence, played a role in legitimizing the practice of capital punishment in the eyes of actors both within and outside the criminal justice system, and we pointed to some objective indicators—such as the dramatic decline in the use of executive clemency in the post-Furman era[12] —as support for this thesis. Implicit in Furman and the 1976 foundational cases. Our assessment was not a positive one. Although the reformist approach spawned an extraordinarily intricate and detailed capital punishment jurisprudence, the resulting doctrines were in practical terms largely unresponsive to the underlying concerns for fairness and heightened reliability that had first led to the constitutional regulation of the death penalty. We described contemporary capital punishment law as the worst of all possible worlds. Its sheer complexity led to numerous reversals of death sentences and thus imposed substantial costs on state criminal justice systems. On closer inspection, however, the complexity concealed the minimalist nature of the Court’s reforms.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

The landscape of the American death penalty is diverse. Though death penalty attitudes show a remarkable and increasing degree of homogeneity by region, race, gender, religion, and other factors, the actual practice of the death penalty varies substantially from region to region, and even from state to state. While these variations are widely recognized, they are not widely studied or understood. The lack of attention paid to the actual practice of the death penalty in different states and regions, the patterns that contribute to its use, and the factors associated with these patterns represents a substantial and troubling gap in our knowledge of an issue as widely studied as the death penalty.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

The United States has repeatedly failed to notify detained foreign nationals of their rights to consular notification and access under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In capital cases, US non-compliance with this ratified Treaty has led to litigation by foreign governments and individual lawyers in domestic courts and international tribunals. While these efforts have had mixed results in individual cases, litigation by Mexico, Germany and other actors has led to increased compliance with Article 36, and a growing recognition of the significance of US treaty obligations.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Foreign Nationals,