April 13, 2010
Justice John Paul Stevens, who in most portrayals has migrated from the center of the court when appointed by President Ford in 1975 to its left flank, has told several reporters that his ideology has not really changed much.
Rather, according to Stevens, he has remained about where he always was while newer and younger appointees have pushed the court to the right.
The record suggests otherwise...
November 14, 2009
The November 9 Supreme Court arguments on whether it is cruel and unusual to impose life in prison without parole on violent juveniles who have not killed anybody understandably got prominent media coverage.
But a far more important imprisonment story gets less attention because it's a running sore that rarely generates dramatic "news." That is our criminal-justice system's...
November 17, 2007
When the Supreme Court voided all federal death-penalty laws in June 1972 -- despite the Constitution's clear intent to allow capital punishment -- three justices explained that these laws had become "cruel and unusual punishment" because they violated "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."
But then, public opinion moved sharply in an...
August 4, 2007
As recently as 20 years ago, it was extraordinarily rare for a convicted prisoner to establish his or her innocence conclusively enough to get public attention. That changed with breakthroughs in DNA science.
The 205th DNA exoneration since 1989 was recorded earlier this month by the Innocence Project, a group of crack defense lawyers who have made such cases their mission. The exonerated...
March 5, 2005
The idea of putting a person to death for a murder committed at age 17 or younger strikes many of us as grotesque. So it may seem fitting that five Supreme Court justices held on March 1 that juvenile executions violate "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" -- the touchstone since 1958 for determining whether punishments are unconstitutionally...
November 4, 2002
When State's Attorney Douglas Gansler stepped before a gaggle of microphones in suburban Montgomery County, Md., last Friday, officials watching TV downtown at the Department of Justice seethed. Gansler, an ambitious Democrat who stressed that "Montgomery County was the community most affected" by the killing spree, announced that "within the next few hours" he would file six...
January 12, 2002
Is John Walker a candidate for the firing squad? Or a mixed-up kid who should be sent to bed without his dessert? Measuring the known facts (and much remains unknown) of this bizarre case against laws and judicial precedents, the answer appears to be that Walker is a traitor who may be hard to convict of treason, who does not appear to deserve the death penalty (unless evidence not yet public...
June 11, 2001
The federal government's first execution in 38 years comes at a time when DNA and other evidence has exonerated enough death row inmates to shake public confidence in the system.
Timothy McVeigh--an unrepentant, confessed mass murderer whose guilt was utterly clear--deserved the death penalty if anyone ever did, and an overwhelming majority of Americans favored his execution. But according to...
May 26, 2001
Timothy McVeigh is the ideal poster boy for the death penalty, it is often said. He is an unmistakably guilty, unrepentant, rational, calculating, confessed mass murderer who can complain neither of racism (he's white) nor of an unfair trial (he had good lawyers). If anyone ever deserved execution, he does. Even leading anti-death-penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau has said: "I'll let the...
April 21, 2001
Congress and the President have a chance this year to show that they care as much about avoiding the execution (and imprisonment) of innocent defendants as they do about punishing the guilty ones. They can adopt the Innocence Protection Act, a bipartisan proposal co-sponsored by death penalty supporters and opponents who agree that you can be tough on crime without punishing innocent people. The...
January 13, 2001
Former Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., is an able and accomplished man who won the respect of many Senate colleagues in both parties. But he is unfit to be Attorney General. The reason is that during an important debate on a sensitive matter, then-Sen. Ashcroft abused the power of his office by descending to demagoguery, dishonesty, and character assassination.
February 12, 2000
The death penalty is so politically correct these days that Hillary Rodham Clinton supports it. Her husband, the Democratic President, has championed curbs on death row appeals. So Illinois Gov. George Ryan's Jan. 31 moratorium on all executions is an extraordinary event. Maybe even a turning point.
July 30, 1997
BETTY ANN BOWSER: In 1992 George McFarland was tried, convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of a Houston convenience store owner. The trial lasted less than three days--and through much of it one of McFarland's attorneys was asleep.
GEORGE McFARLAND: So I'm nudging him with my feet--what are you doing--wake up! So later that day I asked him I said: "Well what happened?" "...
November 18, 1996
On Nov. 7, at about noon, the Supreme Court casually cleared the way for an execution at 9 o'clock that night-in the face of overwhelming evidence that the man to be killed was probably innocent of the prison murder for which he had been condemned.
All nine justices knew or had reason to know of Joseph Payne's probable innocence. It would have been apparent to any fair-minded reader of the briefs...
September 16, 1996
At first blush, accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's pending motion for permission to give media interviews-including one with a famous TV journalist, to be chosen from a gaggle of eager applicants who have already auditioned for the opportunity-might seem an occasion for revulsion.
Here's how the prosecution characterized the motion in a seething Aug. 29 court response filed with Chief...
June 3, 1996
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: In April, President Clinton signed a bill into law that would limit access to federal court by prison inmates. The bill, known as the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, was in part a reaction by the President and Congress to the long delays in getting convicted felons executed. In order to speed up the process, the bill imposes strict time limits on Death Row...
January 1, 1996
Now and then a case comes along that tells us a lot about how close we are coming to executing innocent people in this country, and in substantial numbers-and about what will happen if Congress completes the evisceration of the writ of habeas corpus that is already under way in the Supreme Court.
One such case is that of Missouri death row inmate Lloyd Schlup. It took a revealing turn on Dec. 8,...
December 1, 1995
Death row celebrity journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal got an unfair trial before a biased judge. His "confession" was probably fabricated by police, who may have rigged other evidence too. But he is also - probably - an unrepentant cop-killer. So what now?
You've probably heard about the current darling of the radical-chic crowd and the America-bashing European intellectual set: Mumia Abu-...
October 30, 1995
Buried in a little-noticed Feb. 22 decision by the Supreme Court is an illuminating statistic. It speaks volumes-although the Court pretended otherwise-about the incapacity of many elected state judges, in the current climate, to do justice to persons accused of (capital crimes.
"Alabama's sentencing scheme has yielded some ostensibly surprising statistics," as Justice Sandra Day O'...
September 4, 1995
When barbaric, demagogic, idiotic, patently unconstitutional proposals emanated from members of the once impotent Republican minority in the House of Representatives, it was no big deal.
But when such proposals spew from the mouth of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the most powerful congressional leader in decades, they must be taken seriously. And one of his latest-a mandatory death penalty for...
November 2, 1992
Is there a constitutional right not to be executed for a crime of which you've been convicted but can now prove your innocence?
The question answers itself: Of course there is. But Assistant Attorney General Margaret Griffey of Texas gamely maintained the contrary in an Oct. 7 argument before the Supreme Court in Herrera v. Collins.
"Suppose you have a videotape which conclusively shows the...
December 1, 1990
ON OCTOBER 17, AT 10:58 P.M., GOV-ernor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia sent a message to prisoners on death row, one that says something about what we have come to as a society:
If you treat your guards with exceptional respect and courtesy, if you work hard and strive to reform, if you put yourself at risk to shield hostages threatened with death by prisoners wielding knives and to prevent the...
October 2, 1989
Like most Americans, Lewis Powell Jr. had never given much thought to the death penalty.
Then, in 1972, he joined the Supreme Court. Since then Justice Powell, who retired in June 1987 at the age of 79, has thought about it quite a bit.
He has adhered to his view that nothing in the Constitution bars governments from putting vicious murderers to death. But he has pondered what happens after all...
