INDEX

In this essay, Professor Douglas conducts an historical review of religious attitudes toward capital punishment and the influence of those attitudes on the state’s use of the death penalty. He surveys the Christian Church’s strong support for capital punishment throughout most of its history, along with recent expressions of opposition from many Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups. Despite this recent abolitionist sentiment from an array of religious institutions, Professor Douglas notes a divergence of opinion between the “pulpit and the pew” as the laity continues to support the death penalty in large numbers. Professor Douglas accounts for this divergence by noting the declining influence of religious organizations over the social policy choices of their members. He concludes that the fate of the death penalty in America will therefore “most likely be resolved in the realm of the secular rather than the sacred.

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

Much has been written about why electrocution has persisted so stubbornly over the course of the twentieth century. This Article focuses briefly on more recent developments concerning why electrocution should be abolished entirely. Part I of this Article describes the facts and circumstances surrounding Bryan as well as Bryan’s unusual world-wide notice due to the gruesome photos of the executed Allen Lee Davis posted on the Internet. Part II focuses on the sociological and legal history of electrocution, most particularly the inappropriate precedential impact of In re Kemmler. In Kemmler, the Court found the Eighth Amendment inapplicable to the states and deferred to the New York legislature’s determination that electrocution was not cruel and unusual. Regardless, Kemmler has been cited repeatedly as Eighth Amendment support for electrocution despite Kemmler’s lack of modern scientific and legal validity.

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

When a woman is raped and then murdered, it is among the most horrifying of crimes. It is also, often, among the most sensational, notorious, and galvanizing of cases. In 1964, Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in Queens, New York. Her murder sparked soul-searching across the country because her neighbors heard her cries for help and did not respond: it made us question whether we had become an uncaring people. During the 1970s and 80s a number of serial killers raped and murdered their victims: including Ted Bundy in Florida and William George Bonin, the “Freeway Killer,” in Southern California. In the 1990s, the sexual assault-murder of seven- year-old Megan Kanka in New Jersey contributed to a firestorm of states passing sex offender notification statutes. Rolando Cruz was released from Illinois death row in 1995, after serving eleven years for a crime he did not commit: the rape and murder of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. The crime itself sent shock waves through the Chicago metropolitan area and pressure to quickly solve it contributed to Cruz’s arrest and conviction. In each instance the rape- murder terrified us and made us want to impose the severest of punishments. This explores the crime and punishment of those convicted of committed rape .murder

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

Religious arguments in the course of particular capital sentencing proceedings are very common. This may be in part because capital punishment jurisprudence, unlike the jurisprudence of reproductive rights or segregation, has itself mandated individualized decision-making. Public discussion of whether religious principles or authority compel (or preclude) the imposition of the death penalty for all police killings (or, more broadly, all killings) has been largely mooted by the Supreme Court’s determination that mandatory death penalty statutes violate the Eighth Amendment.

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

The order struck during the regulatory years following Furman v. Georgia and Gregg v. Georgia has been inverted. Executions once were rarities of newsworthy moment; now, they are nearly twice-a-week occurrences that often pass with nary a notice. Skeptical scrutiny of death penalty cases once was the professed and practiced mission of the federal judiciary; now, words like weariness, ennui, and resentment seem better choices to capture the spirit of the federal courts when confronted with complaints from death row. As we will see, the various lines of objection join to form a sophisticated and comprehensive critique.

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

In the past thirty years, American attitudes towards those convicted of crimes have followed a devastating progression toward the dehumanization of criminal defendants. The evolution of law and policy has mirrored these changing attitudes. The philosophies behind incarceration have shifted from “facilitat[ing inmates’] productive re-entry back into the free world” to “using imprisonment merely to punish criminal offenders by … “containing’ them behind bars … for as long as possible.” 4 Rather than preventing crime or rehabilitating offenders, incarceration has become a means to satisfy society’s desire for vengeance and retribution. Responding to this push to punish, prosecutors in their haste to obtain a conviction are more likely to stress the heinousness of crimes rather than questioning the circumstances surrounding …

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

The study results indicate that when test subjects, many of whom are likely retributivists, are presented with information about the problem of innocence, the drop in support for capital punishment spans all points on the Likert scale. Our study suggests that more rigorous testing may demonstrate that an individual’s knowledge of the “innocence problem” can generate more profond changes in attitudes toward the death penalty than indicted by previous studies of the marshall Hypotheses.

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

Although there is no constitutional requirement that a jury participate in the death penalty process, most states do provide, through their capital punishment statutes, that a jury will participate in the decision. The preference for jury sentencing in these circumstances reflects a reluctance to leave power over life solely in the hands of one judge. Still, some scholars have long criticized juries for administering punishment.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Fair Trial,

The attitude of international law and practice to supreme penalties has evolved enormously over the past half-century. At Nuremberg, in 1946, capital punishment was imposed upon Nazi war criminals. But at the Rome Conference in 1998, when the international community provided for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, not only was capital punishment excluded, the text also limited the scope of life imprisonment. These changes were driven principally by evolving norms of international human rights law. The first changes became apparent in the early work of the International Law Commission on the Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind, during the 1950s. When criminal prosecution returned to the international agenda, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was widespread agreement to exclude capital punishment. But at the Rome Conference, a relatively small and geographically isolated group of States made an aggressive attempt to defend capital punishment. Ultimately unsuccessful, their efforts only drew attention to a growing rejection of both capital punishment and life imprisonment in international and national legal systems

• Document type Article
• Themes list Networks,

Capital punishment is not practiced by a majority of the world’s states. Anti-capital punishment domestic policies have led to an international law of human rights that emphatically prohibits cruel and inhuman punishment. International concern for the abolition of capital punishment has prompted Islamic states that still endorse and practice the death penalty to respond with equally compelling concerns based on the tenets of Islamic law. Professor William A. Schabas suggests that Islamic states view capital punishment according to the principles embodied in the Koran. Islamic law functions on the belief that all people have a right to life unless the administration of Islamic law determines otherwise. Professor Schabas emphasizes that capital punishment exists in the domestic law of all Islamic states, but the ways by which these states employ capital punishment are varied and inconsistent. Although Professor Schabas acknowledges that Islamic states correctly argue that capital punishment is an element of Islamic law, he maintains that Islamic states do not recognize the more limited role of the death penalty articulated by the Islamic religion.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Bangladesh
• Themes list Religion ,