In the United States, the right to a jury trial is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Sixth Amendment states, in part, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed...

Stark racial disparities define America’s relationship with the death penalty. Though commentators have scrutinized a range of possible causes for this uneven racial distribution of death sentences, no convincing evidence suggests that any one of these factors consistently account for the unjustified racial disparities at play in the administration of capital punishment. We propose that a unify...

This paper examines the death penalty question from the perspective of the new ethical theory, the Principle of Goodness. At first sight, the Principle seems to be a strictly tighter moral principle than Kant’s categorical imperative; yet we find that the application diverges from the recommendations of Kant in this case. Unlike many discussions of this question, which often argue either no, or...

The authors use a developmental perspective to examine questions about the criminal culpability of juveniles and the juvenile death penalty. Under principles of criminal law, culpability is mitigated when the actor's decision-making capacity is diminished, when the criminal act was coerced, or when the act was out of character. The authors argue that juveniles should not be held to the same sta...

Behavioral science data included in an amicus brief has been introduced into a recent Supreme Court decision (Thompson v. Oklahoma) involving the juvenile death penalty. However, a close examination of the data fails to provide support for either the pro- or antijuvenile death penalty position.

This latter group includes Professor Steven Duke, who, both in his recent book with Albert Gross [FN3] and in his lead commentary [FN4] here, displays an unremitting commitment to redefining the debate on drugs. He powerfully catalogues how possibly cynical legislators have turned drug-prohibition statutes into dangerous instruments permitting use of the death penalty and other "savage" crimina...

This paper examines opinions by Supreme Court justices of the most significant death penalty cases of the 1970s and 1980s [i. We seek to determine: 1) what main justifications were used by justices to support their own opinions; 2) how inconsistent over these cases were justices in issuing their opinions; and 3) what factors led to changes in opinions across time. We examine three types of inco...

This paper describes the experiences of a sociologist as a mitigation expert during the "typical" first degree murder case, from indictment through the penalty phase of the trial. The author, who has worked in death penalty cases (capital murder) since 1988, has served as a mitigation expert in over 40 such cases. Topics covered include: working with a death penalty mitigation team and what to ...