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Capital Punishment and Contemporary Values: People's Misgivings and the Court's Misperceptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

William Bowers
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Extract

Twenty years after the Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes (Furman v. Georgia 1972) and a day after Justice Thurgood Marshall's death, the senior Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harry Blackmun, charged the Court with coming “perilously close to murder” in its latest death penalty ruling. He made this charge in an unusual oral dissent from a decision which held that a federal appeals court could not hear newly developed evidence of a death row inmate's possible innocence (Herrera v. Collins 1992). The Court, nine months earlier, had barred a lower federal court from hearing new evidence challenging execution by asphyxiation as cruel punishment (Gomez v. U.S. District Court 1992) and had then taken the unprecedented step of ordering no further stays of execution (Vasquez v. Harris 1992).1 How did we reach this point when 20 years earlier the Court had declared that the death penalty as applied was too arbitrary to be constitutionally acceptable, and when virtually all other modern industrialized nations of the free world either had already, or soon would, do away with capital punishment?

Type
Symposium: Research on the Death Penalty
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , 1993 , pp. 157 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

I wish to thank Margaret Vandiver, Ken Haas, and Joe Hoffmann for helpful comments on short notice, and Patricia Dugan, Andrea Waldo, Heather MacAskill, and Peter Wong for helping me get the data and references together.

References

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