Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology articles from January 2005

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology archives from January 2005

Illinois death penalty reform: how it happened, what it promises.
January 1, 2005... In January of 2003, three years after Governor George H. Ryan declared a moratorium on executions and ten months after he exercised his clemency and pardon power to empty the nation's eighth largest death row, (1) the Illinois General Assembly...

The decline of the juvenile death penalty: scientific evidence of evolving norms.
January 1, 2005... I. INTRODUCTION Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Atkins v. Virginia (1) holding that the execution of mentally retarded persons violated the Eighth Amendment, legal scholars, advocates, and journalists began to...

The myth of innocence.
January 1, 2005... For decades in America, questions about the death penalty centered on philosophical and sometimes religious debate over the morality of the state-sanctioned execution of another human being. Public opinion ebbed and flowed with support for the...

Exonerations in the United States 1989 through 2003.
January 1, 2005... On August 14, 1989, the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, Illinois, vacated Gary Dotson's 1979 rape conviction and dismissed the charges. (1) Mr. Dotson--who had spent ten years in and out of prison and on parole for this conviction--was...

Protecting the innocent: the Massachusetts Governor's Council Report.
January 1, 2005... This is a difficult time for the death penalty in America. The past five years have witnessed the development of a severe "crisis of confidence" in the death penalty that shows few signs of abating. (1) The crisis was initially precipitated by...

The seduction of innocence: the attraction and limitations of the focus on innocence in capital punishment law and advocacy.
January 1, 2005... INTRODUCTION Over the past five years we have seen an unprecedented swell of debate at all levels of public life regarding the American death penalty. Much of the debate centers on the crisis of confidence engendered by the high-profile...

Further reflections on the guillotine.
January 1, 2005... Perhaps the most moving polemic against the death penalty is Albert Camus' Reflections on the Guillotine. Camus' sharp opposition to the death penalty may have derived from the force of the one story that he repeatedly heard about his father,...

Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty.(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... SCOTT TUROW, ULTIMATE PUNISHMENT: A LAWYER'S REFLECTIONS ON DEALING WITH THE DEATH PENALTY (FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX 2003). Walter Berns relates the following story in his book on capital punishment: In the dark of a wild night a...

Criminal law and criminology: a survey of recent books.
January 1, 2005... E. CHRISTIAN BRUGGER, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND ROMAN CATHOLIC MORAL TRADITION (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) 281 PP. The author examines papal pronouncements and doctrinal writings over the history of the Catholic...