Capital punishment, proportionality review, and claims of fairness (with lessons from Washington State) (original) (raw)
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Capital Punishment, Proportionality Review, and Claims of Fairness
This Article explores the adequacy of one of the safeguards adopted by many states to ensure that the death penalty is applied fairly, following the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. Relying chiefly on evidence drawn from Washington State, this Article asks whether the practice of comparative proportionality review has ensured that there is now a rational basis for distinguishing between those who are sentenced to die and those who are not. An analysis of the trial judge reports employed by the Washington State Supreme Court in reviewing death sentences, as well as the method used by the court in conducting its reviews over the course of the past two decades, indicates that the death penalty remains arbitrary and capricious in its administration. The failure of comparative proportionality review furnishes yet another reason for concluding that capital punishment cannot be conducted in a way that comports with claims of fairness.
Legal disparities in the capital of capital punishment
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
Death penalty opponents charge that wealthy defendants who can hire legal counsel are exempt from capital punishment, but that indigent defendants who receive court-appointed counsel are frequently condemned to death. The critique is based on sensational stories, but anecdotes cannot establish a causal relationship. To explore the issue systematically, the current research examines the impact of legal counsel on the District Attorney's decisions to seek the death penalty and juries' decisions to impose death sentences against adult defendants indicted for capital murder in Harris County (Houston), Texas from 1992Texas from to 1999. Harris County is the largest jurisdiction in the nation to use the appointment method rather than the public defender method to deliver indigent capital defense, though by no means the only such jurisdiction. The empirical comparison of hired counsel to appointed counsel in Harris County reveals three central findings: (1) Defendants who hired counsel for the entire case were never sentenced to death; (2) Defendants who hired counsel for a portion of the case were substantially less likely to be sentenced to death; (3) Hiring counsel is not the province of the wealthy, as almost all of the capital murder defendants in this study were poor. Though
Restoring Empirical Evidence to the Pursuit of Evenhanded Capital Sentencing
2020
In the denial of certiorari review in Hidalgo v. Arizona, 138 S. Ct. 1054 (2018), a four-Justice statement commented on the petition and the underlying litigation challenging, on the basis of empirical evidence, whether the Arizona capital sentencing statute sufficiently narrows the pool of defendants eligible to receive the death penalty. The Hidalgo Statement observes that the Arizona Supreme Court erred in its application of the Federal law and the petition raised an “important Eighth Amendment question” based on research into the operation of the sentencing statute. In declining the case, the four Justices encouraged similar future challenges and urged the development of trial court records examining any such statistical proof of alleged constitutional deficiencies. Since the landmark decision McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), the Supreme Court has essentially sidelined empirically developed challenges to criminal statutes. Hidalgo offers noteworthy guidance to the potenti...
Pace L. Rev., 2003
* In light of the defects of the capital punishment system and recent calls for a moratorium on executions, many are calling for serious reform of the system. Even some who would not eliminate the death penalty entirely propose reforms that they contend would result in fewer executions and would limit the death penalty to a category that they call the "worst of the worst." This program asks the question: Is there a category of defendants who are the "worst of the worst?" Can a crime be so heinous that a defendant can be said to "deserve" to be executed? Would such a limited death penalty be supportable morally, philosophically, and constitutionally? ** Martin J. Leahy is a second career lawyer and solo practitioner in New York City. Mr. Leahy came to the practice of law after working twenty years for the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). He is a 1999 graduate of New York Law School, and a 1995 graduate of Hunter College (CUNY). Mr. Leahy has been a member of the Committee on Capital Punishment at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York for three years. Mr. Leahy is the subcommittee chair responsible for this program.
The Prevailing Injustices in the Application of the Missouri Death Penalty (1 978 to 1996
Lenza et al analyze data pertaining to homicides to test the effectiveness of judicial reforms instituted by Gregg v. Georgia. They conclude that considerable race and class disparities persist in Missouri's death sentencing, which ranks fourth in the US in executions in the post-Furman era, and that the Gregg reforms focusing on jury composition and instruction were misplaced.
The Death Penalty in the United States: A Crisis of Conscience
Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 2004
The articles in this issue discuss many appellate court decisions that turned on due process problems in the guilt and penalty phases of capital murder trials and the troubling role of race in capital prosecutions. Governor Ryan of Illinois cited many of these issues when he declared a moratorium on the death penalty and appointed a blue-ribbon panel to study the prosecution of capital murder in 2000. Governor Ryan commuted the sentences of all Illinois death row inmates in January 2003, in part, because the legislature was unable to address these issues that again appeared in the panel's report. These issues raise serious questions about the reliability of the capital murder system and recommend a continued public debate about its fairness.
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-), 1996
Much of the discussion is designed to explain the process of record-gathering and the methods of analyses, both of science and law, that can be used to conduct proportionality review and to assess the relevance of the data to system-wide claims of unconstitutional infliction of the death penalty .... Although we recognize that proportionality is not a scientific determination, we have attempted to make our determination as precise in terms of their bases and reasoning and as objective as possible. We have used scientific and statistical measures, when helpful, although we recognize that a value judgment is built into practically every measurement. A life is at stake, and although some degree of subjective value judgment may be required, we have attempted to make those judgments explicit so that they can be analyzed and tested against whatever objective measurements are applicable.' I. INTRODUCrION In the twenty years after the United States Supreme Court approved the parameters for the reimposition of capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia 2 and its accompanying cases, 3 state and federal courts have been presented with constitutional challenges to capital punishment based upon statistical evidence of racial and geographic dispari-* This article is dedicated to the memory of Robert N. Wilentz, the late ChiefJustice of the New Jersey Supreme Court.