Sentencing Class @ OSU Moritz College of Law
A new home for an old class blog
recent posts
- Anyone have any distinct views on who Joe Biden should pick as US Attorney General?
- What data in the federal system would indicate the Biden Administration is drawing down the federal drug war?
- A final (too brief) foray into what metrics and data matter for assessing a sentencing system
- Reactions to our look behind the robes with federal sentencing judges?
- Are there any “offender characteristics” that you think must be considered at sentencing? If so, how?
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Category: Death eligible offenses
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After a final review of what we should take away from the McClesky ruling and our discussion of a possible legislative response, we will turn for our last week of death penalty discussion to the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence placing categorical limits on what crimes cannot result in a capital sentence and what criminals…
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As mentioned briefly in class, this coming week we are going to work through Problem 3-3 (at pp. 46-53 here) in order to more closely examine the operation of modern death penalty statutes. This problem asks you to imagine how you might help represent Ted Kaczynski if he were to be prosecuted under applicable death…
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As I have mentioned in class, we will be exploring in coming classes how Florida, Texas and Ohio capital sentencing laws help guide jury death sentencing discretion for the Unibomber, Ted Kaczynski. You should imagine yourself preparing for getting a jury to recommend a life sentence rather than a death sentence for Teddy K. The…
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As I have repeatedly mentioned in class, we will be exploring in our next few classes how Florida, Texas and Ohio capital sentencing laws help guide jury death sentencing discretion for the Unibomber (and others). The essentials for preparation appear at pp. 252 to 257 of our text, though you also need to check out two Ohio statutory…
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A helpful student alerted me to this notable accounting of mass shooting in 2014 in the United States. Though I will not vouch for all the data, I still think it is notable (and not all that surprising) that this internet accounting of mass shootings lists 283 mass shootings in the US (roughly 5 every week of the year), and yet…
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The issue presented to the Supreme Court in Hall v. Florida is "Whether the Florida scheme for identifying mentally retarded defendants in capital cases violates Atkins v. Virginia." Here are the top-side briefs: Brief of petitioner Freddie Lee Hall Motion for leave to file amici brief filed by Professors Adam Lamparello and Charles MacLean in…
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After a final review of what we should take away from the McClesky ruling, we will turn for our last week of death penalty discussion to the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence which places categorical limits on what crimes cannot result in capital sentence and what criminals can not be executed for their crimes. Here,…
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Sorry to have played an (evil?) game of guess the murderer at the end of class yesterday, but I think the story of Terry Nichols encounters with both the federal and Oklahoma capital punishment system provides a useful reminder that some (many?) high-profile US mass murderers can escape a death sentence in various ways. Via his Wikipedia…
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Our class conversation on Wednesday confirmed my instinct that there is a lot we can and should learn by extra attention to the litigation and outcome in the Kennedy child rape capital case decision by the Supreme Court last summer. Helpfully, the blog Sex Crimes has this terrific resource page with lots and lots of links…
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As I discussed in Thursday’s class, in Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977), the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment categorically prohibits the death penalty for the crime of rape of an adult woman. Coker is an amazing read, in part because the defendant, Ehrlich Anthony Coker, would seem to be a poster…
Sentencing Class @ OSU Moritz College of Law 