Eighth Amendment. Death Penalty. Missouri Supreme Court Holds That the Juvenile Death Penalty Violates the Eighth Amendment. State ex rel. Simmons v. Roper, 112 S.W.3d 397 (Mo. 2003) (En banc), Cert. Granted, 124 S. Ct 1171 (2004)

2004 ◽  
Vol 117 (7) ◽  
pp. 2456 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Eighth Amendment

scholarly journals An Argument for the Admissibility of Execution Impact Evidence in Pennsylvania

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paige H. Forster
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
Capital Trials ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Penalty Phase

In 1991, the United States Supreme Court made a significant change to sentencing proceedings during capital trials. The Court ruled in Payne v. Tennessee that the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit “victim impact evidence,” testimony about the character of the murder victim and the impact of the death on the victim’s family. The Payne decision permits highly emotional testimony from family members to enter into the penalty phase of a death penalty trial.

scholarly journals Revisiting Death's Difference: The Philosophical Anthropology of the U.S. Death Penalty and the Impossibility of Capital Due Process

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-208
Author(s):  
G.P. Marcar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
The U.S

AbstractWithin the United States, legal challenges to the death penalty have held it to be a “cruel and unusual” punishment (contrary to the Eighth Amendment) or arbitrarily and unfairly enacted (contrary to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). The Eighth Amendment requires that punishments not be disproportionate or purposeless. In recent rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has adopted a piecemeal approach to this matter. In regard to particular classes of defendant, the Court has sought to rule on whether death is likely to be a proportional and purposeful punishment, as well as whether—given the condition of these defendants—such a determination can be reliably and accurately gauged. This article will suggest a different approach. Instead of asking whether, given the nature of certain categories of human defendant, the death penalty is constitutional in their case, I will begin by asking what—given the nature of the U.S. death penalty—one must believe about human beings for death to be a proportionate punishment. From this, I will argue that to believe that these penal goals are capable of fulfilment by the death penalty entails commitment to an empirically unconfirmable philosophical anthropology. On this basis, it will be further argued that the beliefs required for the U.S. death penalty's proportional and purposeful instigation (pursuant to the Eighth Amendment) are not congruent with the demands of legal due process.

The Decline of the Judicial Override

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 539-557
Author(s):  
Michael L. Radelet ◽  
G. Ben Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
National Consensus ◽  
Key Questions

Since 1972, the Supreme Court has experimented with regulation of the death penalty, seeking the illusive goals of consistency, reliability, and fairness. In this century, the court held that the Sixth Amendment prohibited judges from making findings necessary to impose a death sentence. Separately, the court held that the Eighth Amendment safeguarded evolving standards of decency as measured by national consensus. In this article, we discuss the role of judges in death determinations, identifying jurisdictions that initially (post 1972) allowed judge sentencing and naming the individuals who today remain under judge-imposed death sentences. The decisions guaranteeing a jury determination have so far been applied only to cases that have not undergone initial review in state courts. Key questions remain unresolved, including whether the evolving standards of decency permit the execution of more than 100 individuals who were condemned to death by judges without a jury's death verdict before implementation of the rules that now require unanimous jury votes.

The Supreme Court, Cruel and Unusual Punishment, and the Death Penalty

1969 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-131
Author(s):  
Sol Rubin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of

The history of the Eighth Amendment (prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment) as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States is bleak. For all practical purposes, the Court's rulings have rendered the Eighth Amendment a dead letter.

scholarly journals The Supreme Court, The Death Penalty, and The Harris Case

1992 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judge Stephen Reinhardt
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Supreme Court

scholarly journals “A World of Steel-Eyed Death”: An Empirical Evaluation of the Failure of the Strickland Standard to Ensure Adequate Counsel to Defendants with Mental Disabilities Facing the Death Penalty

2020 ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Michael Perlin ◽  
Tailia Roitberg Harmon ◽  
Sarah Chatt
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Therapeutic Jurisprudence ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Mental Disabilities ◽  
Legal Representation ◽  
Entire Area ◽  
The Law

First, we discuss the background of the development of counsel adequacy in death penalty cases. Next, we look carefully at Strickland, and the subsequent Supreme Court cases that appear—on the surface—to bolster it in this context. We then consider multiple jurisprudential filters that we believe must be taken seriously if this area of the law is to be given any authentic meaning. Next, we will examine and interpret the data that we have developed. Finally, we will look at this entire area of law through the filter of therapeutic jurisprudence, and then explain why and how the charade of “adequacy of counsel law” fails miserably to meet the standards of this important school of thought. Our title comes, in part, from Bob Dylan’s song, Shelter from the Storm. As one of the authors (MLP) has previously noted in another article drawing on that song’s lyrics, “[i]n a full-length book about that album, the critics Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard characterize the song as depicting a ‘mythic image of torment.’” The defendants in the cases we write about—by and large, defendants with profound mental disabilities who face the death penalty in large part because of the inadequacy of their legal representation— confront (and are defeated by) a world of ‘steel-eyed death.’ We hope that this Article helps change these realities.

The Time of the Trap Door

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Trap Door ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.

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