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Supreme failures (reviewing Most Deserving of Death? An Analysis of the Supreme Court’s Death Penalty Jurisprudence, by Kenneth Williams (Ashgate 2012))

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Notes

  1. See Liebman et al. [1] (concluding based on extensive empirical study that capital convictions are “persistently and systematically fraught with alarming amounts of error”).

  2. See Gross [2] (arguing that it is not coincidental that error rates in capital cases are higher than in non-capital cases because “the nature of capital cases multiplies the likelihood of error”).

  3. To date, 18 people have been exonerated through DNA testing after having been sentenced to death. See Innocence Project website, available at http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/ (last visited on January 24, 2013). See generally Brandon L. Garrett, Convicting the Innocent (2011).

  4. See, e.g., Marceau [3] (observing that as a result of enactment of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and Supreme Court decisions interpreting that statute, “federal habeas review of state convictions has become futile, illusory, and so improbable as to be ‘microscopic’”).

  5. 466 U.S. 668, 687–88 (1984) (holding that to prevail on an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, the claimant must demonstrate that counsel performed in a constitutionally-deficient manner and that, absent the error, there was a reasonable probability of a different outcome).

  6. 481 U.S. 279 (1987).

  7. See Garrett, supra note 1.

  8. 428 U.S. 153 (1976). The Court has explained that its effort to narrow the class of death-eligible persons is intended “to ensure that only the most deserving of execution are put to death”. Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 319 (2002).

  9. See, e.g., Hughes [4] (reporting empirical study finding that death sentences continue to be imposed in a fundamentally arbitrary manner); McCord [5] (surveying popular press accounts of capital trials and concluding that death sentences continue to be arbitrarily imposed).

References

  1. Liebman, J. S., et al. (2000). Capital attrition: error rates in capital cases, 1973–1995. Texas Law Review, 78, 1839.

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  2. Gross, S. R. (1996). The risks of death: why erroneous convictions are common in capital cases. Buffalo Law Review, 44, 469.

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  3. Marceau, J. F. (2012). Challenging the habeas process rather than the result. Washington and Lee Law Review, 69, 85.

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  4. Hughes, E. (2012). Arbitrary death: an empirical study of mitigation. Washington University Law Review, 89, 581.

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  5. McCord, D. (2005). Lightning still strikes. Brooklyn Law Review, 71, 797.

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  1. Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Russell D. Covey

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  1. Russell D. Covey
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Correspondence to Russell D. Covey.

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Covey, R.D. Supreme failures (reviewing Most Deserving of Death? An Analysis of the Supreme Court’s Death Penalty Jurisprudence, by Kenneth Williams (Ashgate 2012)). Crime Law Soc Change 61, 113–115 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-013-9487-1

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