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Death Penalty Abolishment
On June 24th 2004 the Supreme Court of the State of New York determined that the state's jury instructions regarding the death penalty was unconstitutional; effectively abolishing the death penalty in New York. The specific case involved in this decision was the case of Stephan LaValle, who was "convicted of first degree murder and a jury sentenced him to death." ("People v LaValle") However, when his case was appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, LaValle argued that the deadlock instructions given to the jury were unconstitutional under the De Process Clauses of both the state and federal constitutions.
According to the state of New York's statute at the time, if a defendant was found guilty of first degree murder, the jury was then instructed to determine the...
Whatever the jury decided, the decision must be unanimous, and if they were unable to reach a unanimous decision, the court would automatically impose a life sentence, but with the eligibility for parole after 20-25 years. In effect, if the jury could not decide, then the court would impose a lighter sentence than the two choices given to the jury. The highest court in New York determined that a jury may be inclined to imposed the death sentence on a defendant just to ensure that they would not be released at sometime in the future, and this violated the constitutional rights of the defendant.
It was the case of Anthony Porter, a man sentenced to death and who came within 50 hours of his execution before the court decided to intervene. And watching from the governor's mansion in Springfield Illinois, Governor George Ryan turned to his wife and said "how the hell does that happen? How does an innocent man sit on death row for 15 years and gets no relief?" (Mills, 2011) It was at that very moment that…
References
"Illinois." Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/illinois-1
Retrieved from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-03-10/news/ct-met-illinois-death-penalty-history20110309_1_death-penalty-death-row-death-sentences
"People v LaValle." (2005-2006). Tauro Law Review 21(30). Retrieved from http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/touro21&div=11&id=&page=
Utilitarian or Retributivist Death penalty, the capital punishment, was called by Brennan as an "official murder" because of the main fact that it takes life as a form of providing justice to extreme crimes committed by criminals, an "eye for an eye punishment" as others may say. Justice Brennan, a utilitarian, is against the capital punishment because he believes that death penalty is not reasonable to pay for a crime. This is
From 1977 to 2007, the number of death sentences per capita was as follows: Alabama .89, Oklahoma .818, Mississippi .558, Nevada .546, Delaware .497, North Carolina .481, Florida .463, South Carolina .422, Arizona .412, Arkansas .399, Texas .379, Louisiana .342, Missouri .313, Pennsylvania .277, Ohio .270, Tennessee .270, Idaho .267, Georgia .236, Illinois .233, California .219, Kentucky .193, Virginia .192, Oregon .184, Indiana .148, Nebraska .147, Wyoming .134, Montana
Capital Punishment in the United States Capital punishment is one of the comprehensive, but debatable punishments given to criminal offenders in the U.S. And many other nations across the globe. Capital punishment involves the issuance of the death penalty because of committing serious crimes like crime in the society. Capital punishment has received tumultuous public support touching both ends of the society with its authorization in thirty-seven American states. It is
Murder cannot be a decried and yet practiced by the same entity without being hypocritical. Innumerable individuals on death row have been wrongfully convicted due to any number of reasons. The appeals of death row inmates sometimes never get heard. Those inmates who cannot afford to fight a good appeal are the worse off of all. Because DNA testing and more traditional forms of evidence can be used to
A good example is the 1985 murder of convenience store clerk Cynthia Barlieb, whose murder was prosecuted by a district attorney bent on securing execution for Barlieb's killer (Pompeilo 2005). The original trial and all the subsequent appeals forced Barlieb's family, including four young daughters, to spend 17 years in the legal process - her oldest daughter was 8 years old when Cynthia was first shot, and 25 when
Moreover, in Perry v. Louisiana, 498 U.S. 38 (1990), the Court used that decision to bolster Louisiana's attempts to forcibly medicate a prisoner in order to make him death-eligible. If one agrees that the death penalty is a just penalty for one who has committed a capital crime, and that the reason that mentally ill defendants should not be executed is because they lack competence, then it does not