Top Research Papers on Death Penalty

PART I: THE ENDURING LEGACY OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES CHAPTER 1. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE EARLY PERIOD: 1608-1929 CHAPTER 2. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE PRE-MODERN PERIOD: 1930-1967 CHAPTER 3. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE MODERN PERIOD: 1977-PRESENT PART II: LEGAL HISTORY, CONSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS, AND COMMON JUSTIFICATIONS FOR CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES CHAPTER 4. A BRIEF LEGAL HISTORY OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES CHAPTER 5. CONSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS FOR CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES CHAPTER 6. COMMON JUSTIFICATIONS FOR THE DEATH PENALTY ...

Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Previous research exploring death penalty attitudes has primarily focused on individual and cultural factors. Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may also shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend toward elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using gl...

Capital punishment remains a controversial issue in the United States. While several states do not have the death penalty, most still do

This distinguished constitutional theorist takes a hard look at current criminal law and the Supreme Court's most recent decisions regarding the legality of capital punishment. Examining the penal system, capital punishment, and punishment in general, he reviews the continuing debate about the purpose of punishment for deterrence, rehabilitation, or retribution.

The federal death penalty results in few executions but is central to the larger story of capital punishment in the United States. In the last decade, federal statutes governing the federal death penalty seem to have exerted outsize influence with the Supreme Court in its development of “proportionality” doctrine, the rules by which the Justices confine the use of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment. In three cases rejecting capital punishment for mentally retarded offenders, juvenile offenders and child rapists, the Court noted that federal death-penalty statutes would have conferre...

This report discusses legislation regarding the death penalty in the 109th Congress. The USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act (Reauthorization Act) contains a number of death penalty related provisions. Some create new federal capital offenses; some add the death penalty as a sentencing option in the case of preexisting federal crimes; some alter the procedural attributes of federal capital cases. Other proposals offered during the 109th Congress would have followed the same pattern: some new crimes; some new penalties for old crimes; and some procedural adjustments. Only one of the...

There are theoretical and philosophical arguments in favor and against capital punishment. Advocates of capital punishment assert that death is a proper punishment for those who commit the most heinous crimes because offenders owe their lives to society as payment for the harms they inflicted on society (retribution). Further, the death penalty makes us safer by causing fear in would-be murderers so that they do not commit their crimes (deterrence) and by taking away the lives of murderers who might murder again if not executed (incapacitation).

With the passage of P.L. 103-322, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the federal death penalty became available as a possible punishment for a substantial number of new and existing civilian offenses. On April 24, 1996, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 made further modifications and additions to the list of federal capital crimes. On June 25, 2002, P.L. 107-197, the Terrorist Bombings Convention Implementation Act of 2002, added another capital crime to the United States Code. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, P.L. 10...

This book offers a unique and comprehensive approach to the arguments for and against capital punishment, in the United States and internationally. Using the testimony of witnesses at the historic 2004-2005 New York Death Penalty Hearings, VOICES examines, in detail, the contemporary public policy debate about the theoretical justifications for the death penalty (retribution, deterrence), costs, abuses of prosecutorial discretion, jury functioning, problems of race and mental illness, executing the innocent, and international practices. VOICES presents the testimony of over 100 witnesses from ...

Investigating the attitudes about capital punishment in contemporary America, this book poses the question: can ending the death penalty be done democratically? How is it that a liberal democracy like the United States shares the distinction of being a leading proponent of the death penalty with some of the world's most repressive regimes? Reporting on the first study of initiative and referendum processes used to decide the fate of the death penalty in the United States, this book explains how these processes have played an important, but generally neglected, role in the recent history of Ame...

For nearly forty years, the Alabama-based independent scholar M. Watt Espy Jr. has been compiling a database of executions that extends across the history of the United States, from the colonial settlements to 1945. While it may never be complete, this collection promises to permit analyses of capital punishment in America that will advance our perception and understanding of long-term trends. In Race, Class, and the Death Penalty, Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb have taken up this challenge. Notwithstanding its broad subtitle, their work is a monograph that focuses on particular features ...

A provocative examination of the most recent shift in court opinion that, in effect, works to expedite the administration of death sentences.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Great Britain experienced a dramatic swell in capital offenses. This swell was the result not of an increase in crime, or even of an increase in violent crime; it was the result, rather, of Parliament’s continued enlargement of the long list of offenses punishable by death. In the "illogical chaos" of British law, petty crimes such as pick pocketing were capital offenses while attempted murder remained outside the capital code (Trevelyan 348). Still, by 1770, the seeds of the capital code’s demise had been planted. It was in that year that Sir William Meredit...

ic use. In short, he seeks to join 1950s era functionalism with 1990s era gender theory and social movements theory, with possibly a bit of Jungian psychology thrown in. The attainment of such a vast theoretical project, even if considered separately from its application to the Promise Keepers, is well beyond the scope of Bartkowski’s relatively thin volume. The purpose and perspective of the book thus remain uncertain. Often, the book reads like a draft version that needs another revision or two to clarify the concepts, how they fit together, and how they apply to empirical observation. One p...

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule have argued that, if recent empirical studies claiming to find a substantial deterrent effect from capital punishment are valid, consequentialists and deontologists alike should conclude that capital punishment is not merely morally permissible, but actually morally required. While there is ample reason to reject this argument on the ground that the empirical studies are deeply flawed (as economists John Donohue and Justin Wolfers elaborate in a separate essay), this response directly addresses Sunstein and Vermeule's moral argument. Sunstein and Vermeule cont...

For nearly forty years, the Alabama-based independent scholar M. Watt Espy Jr. has been compiling a database of executions that extends across the history of the United States, from the colonial settlements to 1945. While it may never be complete, this collection promises to permit analyses of capital punishment in America that will advance our perception and understanding of long-term trends. In Race, Class, and the Death Penalty, Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb have taken up this challenge. Notwithstanding its broad subtitle, their work is a monograph that focuses on particular features ...

Both legal scholars and social scientists have leveraged new research evidence on the deterrent effects of the death penalty into calls for more executions that they claim will save lives and new rules to remove procedural roadblocks and hasten executions. However, the use of total intentional homicides to estimate deterrence is a recurring aggregation error in the death penalty debate in the U.S.: by studying whether executions and death sentences affect all homicides, these studies fail to identify a more plausible target of deterrence - namely, those homicides that are punishable by death. ...

Abstract: This paper aims to contribute to a distinctively Christian view of capital punishment within a peace church perspective. The present essay builds from the previous work of Mennonite-Anbaptist writers on this question--John Howard Yoder, Christopher Marshall, Gardner Hanks and Millard Lind. It offers a two-part argument concerning capital punishment, based on the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of John and the message of the cross in the epistles of Paul. ********** In the past decade three Mennonite-Anabaptist writers have contributed significantly to the debate concerning Christian ...

In every society, citizens must decide how to punish criminals, uphold the virtue of justice, and preserve the security of the community. In doing so, the members of society must ask themselves how they will punish those who carry out the most abhorrent of crimes. Many common responses to such a question is that death is an acceptable punishment for the most severe crimes. But to draw some theoretical distinction between a crime that deserves incarceration and a crime that is so heinous that it deserves capital punishment is subject to three errors. First, what possible line could be drawn? To...

“Suddenly realized grievances” (Useem 1980; Walsh 1981) play an important but largely unacknowledged role in the struggle over capital punishment in the United States. One form such grievances may take is that of “flawed executions”—executions in which public sensibilities are offended by a breakdown in routine procedures of convicting murderers and putting them to death. This paper discusses four ways in which executions may be flawed: executions may be technically botched, convicts may not play their assigned roles, the prescribed solemnity of the death chamber may be compromised, and finall...

A cruel punishment is an invalid one that does not respect a felon’s dignity or personality. It deprives or limits a criminal’s rights. It is not conductive to a criminal’s rehabilitation. It will inflict physical or mental anguish on the accused. With its absoluteness and comparativeness, we determine whether a punishment is not cruel. The death penalty, either by its absoluteness or comparativeness, is certainly a cruel punishment.

At the end of the opening chapter of his Second Treatise of Government, Locke describes political power in the following terms: ‘Political Power then I take to be a Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property, and of employing the force of the Community, in the Execution of such Laws, and in the defence of the Common-wealth from Foreign Injury, and all this only for the Publick Good.’

Questionnaires concerning attitude toward capital punishment, liberalism-conservatism, and the assignment of penalties in 13 capital cases were administered to 190 college students. All scales correlated significantly with each other, with Ss who were opposed to capital punishment less likely to assign the death penalty in specific cases. Factor analysis showed separate factors for murderers, assassins, attitudes and demographic data. The relationship of these findings to the Witherspoon case is discussed.

The American Law Institute has launched a revision of its Model Penal Code provisions on sentencing and punishment that will be comprehensive in almost all respects. Conspicuously missing from the new sentencing project, however, is any examination of the Model Penal Code's provisions on capital punishment. This essay argues that a reexamination of capital punishment is both necessary and practical as part of the larger sentencing reform project. Avoiding the death penalty is unprincipled and would leave the Model Code's single weakest section standing while every other sentencing provision wo...

Over the last three decades, the Supreme Court has established complex procedural safeguards in an effort to reduce the arbitrariness of the death penalty. Despite the Court's considerable efforts however, capital punishment is still imposed in an arbitrary fashion. One reason for the continued arbitrariness is that the Court's efforts have focused almost exclusively on the guilt and sentencing phases of capital trials, while imposing few barriers limiting which capital cases are input into the criminal justice system in the first place. Because there are few legal constraints on the sheer num...

When the switch is thrown, the prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." "The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands." The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the pris oner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool. "The body turns bright red as its temperature rises," and the prisoner's "flesh swells and his skin stretches to the point of breaking. Somet...

In almost every state that authorizes capital punishment, local county prosecutors are responsible for deciding when to seek the death penalty and for handling capital trials. This approach has proven to be arbitrary and inefficient. Because death penalty cases are extremely expensive and complicated, counties with large budgets and experienced prosecutors are able to seek the death penalty often. By contrast, smaller counties with limited budgets often lack the funds and institutional knowledge to seek the death penalty in truly heinous cases. The result is geographic arbitrariness. The diffe...

In this paper, I introduce and compare & contrast well-known theories of justice. Then, I introduce realities of capital punishment practice in the United States using both descriptive empirical data and summaries of recent studies of the death penalty. Finally, I assess capital punishment in terms of ways in which it is consistent and inconsistent with the major theories of justice. The primary goal of the paper is to answer the question of whether capital punishment in the United States is just or not, and why. This is the first time these theories of justice have specifically been applied t...

This paper was prepared to fulfill partial requirements for SOC 315 and 316, which serve as the Writing Intensive Courses (WIC) required for a degree in Sociology from Oregon State University.

This guide serves as an introduction to the resources available about the Death Penalty, specifically for LAW 6518 Death Penalty Seminar: Issues in Capital Punishment.

1. Introduction, by Brian F. Schaffner and Patrick J. Sellers Part One: Origins 2. Framing and Value Recruitment in the Debate over Teaching Evolution, by Thomas E. Nelson, Dana E. Wittmer, and Allyson P. Shortle 3. Partisan Framing in Legislative Debates, by Douglas B. Harris 4. Building a Framing Campaign: Interest Groups and the Debate on Partial-birth Abortion, by Jessica C. Gerrity 5. Mobilizing to Frame Election Campaigns, by Taylor Ansley and Patrick J. Sellers Part Two: Impact 6. Competing Frames in a Political Campaign, by James N. Druckman 7. Taxing Death or Estates? When Frames Infl...

The essay examines Missouri's recent history in executing prisoners whose cases emerged from state court review to enter federal habeas corpus litigation after enactment of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). AEDPA dramatically altered federal procedure for such cases, erecting greater barriers to merits review by Article III courts of federal constitutional violations. Further, the piece explores consequences of the state's lack of a systematic examination of its modern death penalty (unlike jurisdictions such as, for examples, Illinois and Maryland), and outlin...

William A. Schabas reviews the history of the philosophical and legal interpretations of this fundamental norm, and closely examines its impact on the way the world's courts are currently grappling with the issue of how to implement capital punishment. This is a fascinating study of evolving human rights norms that in turn have generated a rich body of international comparative case law favoring the progressive limitation and ultimate abolition of the death penalty.

This article considers what happens when the death penalty is put on the ballot. It reviews the history of referenda/initiatives concerning capital punishment from the start of the twentieth century to the present. That history reveals the role that referenda/ initiatives have played in struggles against and within governmental institutions. In addition, we find that abolitionists seldom prevail in those electoral contests. We consider the implications of these findings for the prospects that the death penalty could be ended democratically.

This article focuses on the cases of 664 foreign nationals, the majority of whom are migrant workers, under sentence of death across the Gulf states (including Jordan and Lebanon) between 2016 and 2021. The features of these cases suggest that they are inextricably linked to migrant workers’ dependency under the kafala system, with examples of migrants duped into smuggling drugs across the border by their migrant broker, and once in country, accounts of violent altercations due to disputes about exit visas, and in the case of migrant domestic workers, self-defence against sexual violence. Enga...

The statutory scheme for capital punishment in Washington State' vests local county prosecuting attorneys with the power to seek the execution of murderers in certain circumstances. But nothing requires prosecutors to seek capital punishment. The choice is theirs and theirs alone. No judge may compel a prosecutor to seek death. Alternatively, no judge may prevent a prosecutor who wishes to seek the death penalty from doing so. And given the demise of the grand jury, there is no check at all against overzealous prosecutorial decisions to seek death. While a jury may ultimately refuse to authori...

Professor Pelikan, the sterling Professor of History at Yale University, is developing if not a genre at least a style of interfacing Christian history with theology and the arts. This thin volume of six chapters is developed from lectures given at three universities on the subject of Dante and the interface with Western religious ideas. This volume is to be added to Pelikan's Bach Among the Theologians, 1986, His Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons, 1990, and his earlier work, Jesus Through the Centuries which concentrates on visual presentations of the Christ. The brief preface relat...

The primary purpose of this study was to examine public support for the death penalty in Brazil and to determine factors that influence such support. Currently, Brazil has the death penalty for cases involving war crimes, genocides, terrorism, and crime against humanity. The country’s constitution, however, prohibits the use of the death penalty in ordinary crimes. Analyzing individual-level cross-sectional data collected by the American Barometer Survey, we found that a significant majority of Brazilians support the death penalty, with more than two thirds expressing greater support. In terms...

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A replication and extension of a weekly ARZMA analysis (1989–1991) by Cochran et al. (1994), which appeared in Criminology, confirms that Oklahoma's return to capital punishment in 1990, after a 25-year moratorium, was followed by a significant increase in killings involving strangers. Moreover, a multivariate autoregressive analysis, which includes measures of the frequency of executions, the level of print media attention devoted to executions, and selected sociodemographic variables, produced results consistent with the brutalization hypothesis for total homicides, as well as a variety of d...

In 2000-2001, Judge Ponsor presided over the first death penalty case in Massachusetts in nearly 50 years, United States v. Gilbert. Gilbert’s trial marked only the third time that a federal capital case had gone to trial in a state without the death penalty. According to Ponsor, he felt a particularly heavy responsibility to ensure that both the government and the defense got a fair trial. In fact, in 2001, after the conclusion of the trial, Ponsor did something somewhat unusual for a judge; he wrote a lengthy editorial about the death penalty. He wrote: “[t]he simple question - not for me as...

While scholars seem united on the sentiment that abolition is the ultimate resting place for capital sentencing in the United States, their arguments vary as to how the system will reach that point. For example, Carol and Jordan Steiker argue that the systemic disarray of capital sentencing in the United States is a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s attempt to constitutionalize capital sentencing. This Article contends that the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence that has developed since 1972, when the Court reset capital sentencing in Furman v. Georgia, has aided the Court in g...

While most western democracies have renounced the death penalty, capital punishment enjoys vast and growing support in the United States. A significant and vocal minority, however, continues to oppose it. Against Capital Punishment is the first full account of anti-death penalty activism in America during the years since the ten-year moratorium on executions ended. Building on in-depth interviews with movement leaders and the records of key abolitionist organizations, this work traces the struggle against the pro-death penalty backlash that has steadily gained momentum since the 1970s. It revi...

Preface Acknowledgements Ch. 1 Capital Punishment: The Law and the Issues Ch. 2 Cruel and Unusual as Applied Furman V. Georgia (1972) Ch. 3 Not Inherently Unconstitutional Gregg v. Georgia (1976) Ch. 4 Texas Death Penalty Procedures Jurek v. Texas (1976) Ch. 5 Rape and the Death PenaltyCoker v. Georgia (1977) Ch. 6 Mandatory Death PenaltyWoodson v. North Carolina (1976) Ch. 7 "Mandatory" Death Statutes Blystone v. Pennsylvania (1990) Ch. 8 Vague Aggravating Factors Godfrey v. Georgia (1980) Ch. 9 Mitigating Evidence Lockett v. Ohio (1978) Ch. 10 Jury Unanimity on Mitigating Evidence McKoy v. N...

However despite the enuniciation of ‘rarest of rare’, there has been no decrease in the number of death sentences awarded by various courts. This essay shall attempt to chart the ‘hardening’ of the criminal justice system and increased punishment, and particularly focus on the award and use of the death penalty.

The circumstances of lighter punishment on the death penalty are statutory conditions and legal particulars which can prevent the immediate enforcement of judgments.The lighter punishment in the current Penal Code will not be an obstacle to conceptual and operational problems from the following three aspects: expecting possibility of criminals,the victim's faults and the lower degree of risk of the criminal personality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore previously untouched areas of analysis in Texas death penalty law in an attempt to broaden current understanding of how the people and politicians of Texas view the justifications for capital punishment. While the topic of modern capital punishment in Texas has been the subject of dozens if not hundreds of scholarly reviews, there is a noticeable gap in historical analysis of the Republic Era (approx. 1836 through 1845) criminal law through the early 20th century. The perception of this period is one of extreme lawlessness, of bandits and cowboys and Tex...

THE DEATH PENALTY EXISTS AS THE MOST SEVERE FORM OF PUNISHMENT AVAILABLE worldwide. Over one-half of all nation-states have abolished the death penalty either by law or by not conducting executions. The United States is one country that actively uses capital punishment. The Death Penalty Information Center (2000) reported that the year 2000 was "perhaps the most significant single year affecting death penalty opinion in United States history." In that year, Governor George Ryan of Illinois temporarily suspended the use of capital punishment in Illinois and appointed a commission to investigate...

In this volume, Swedish human rights activist and political figure, Hans Goran Franck, examines the administration of the death penalty from a historical perspective. The author's opinions are based on his lifelong work and devotion to abolishing the 'barbaric punishment'. Building upon previously unpublished material and considerable detail drawn from Franck's personal experiences, it focuses on both the progressive developments within European countries and institutions over several decades, and the frustratingly retrograde situation that prevails in the United States. The author dedicated t...

This book contains a selection of papers that were presented during the multidisciplinary conference 'Beyond the Death Penalty: Reflections on Punishment', organised by the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights. The event marked the 150th anniversary of the de facto abolition of the death penalty in the Netherlands. As the title suggests, the scope of this volume moves beyond the death penalty. After a first cluster of chapters with a strong focus on capital punishment, an intriguing mixture of topics in relation to punishment is presented, including chapters on the populist context of contempora...