Sentencing Class @ OSU Moritz College of Law

As mentioned in class, there are many lessons to draw from our Unibomber capital sentencing exercise, so the start of our next class will be continuing our discussion of capital sentencing laws and their application in Florida, Texas and Ohio.   One lesson we have already discussed in various ways in various settings is how many different "whos" can have an impact on the administration of sentencing systems, and I thought it might be useful to link to just a small slice of a huge body of research/commentary on various "whos" impacting capital sentences.  So:

Victims:

• "A Heavy Thumb On The Scale: The Effect Of Victim Impact Evidence On Capital Decision Making"
• "#BlackLivesDon’tMatter: Race-of-Victim Effects in US Executions, 1976-2013"

Prosecutors:

• "America's Top Five Deadliest Prosecutors: How Overzealous Personalities Drive The Death Penalty"
• "Life and Death Decisions: Prosecutorial Discretion and Capital Punishment in Missouri"

Defense attorneys:

• "Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer"
• "Capital Defense Lawyers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

Trial judges:

• "The Death Penalty: Should the Judge or the Jury Decide Who Dies?"
• "The Death Penaltyin Alabama: Judge Override"

Jurors:

• "Blind Justice: Juries Deciding Life And Death With Only Half the Truth; How Death Penalty Jurors are Unfairly Selected, Manipulated, and Kept in the Dark"
• "Capital Jurors in an Era of Death Penalty Decline"

Appellate judges:

• "A Broken System: The Persistent Patterns of Reversals of Death Sentences in the United States"
• "In states with elected high court judges, a harder line on capital punishment"

Governors:

• "The Death of Death Row Clemency and the Evolving Politics of Unequal Grace"
• "Rethinking the Timing of Capital Clemency"

Coincidentally, Ohio's own Gov. John Kasich provided today an interesting twist on capital sentencing "whos":

     "Ohio Gov Kasich issues reprieve days before scheduled execution so clemency process can consider new juror letter"

UPDATE:  And now another sad story of another serious crime provides another "who" example:

    "Prosecutor will seek the death penalty if Westerville shooting suspect survives"