Faculty Bibliography

"Unique among Western democracies in refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the United States has attempted instead to reform and rationalize state death penalty practices through federal constitutional law. Courting Death traces the unusual and distinctive history of top-down judicial regulation of capital punishment under the Constitution and its unanticipated consequences for our time. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of widespread abolition of the death penalty around the world, provisions for capital punishment that had long fallen under the purview of the states were challenged in federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened in two landmark decisions, first by constitutionally invalidating the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972) on the grounds that it was capricious and discriminatory, followed four years later by its restoration in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Since then, by neither retaining capital punishment in unfettered form nor abolishing it outright, the Supreme Court has created a complex regulatory apparatus that has brought executions in many states to a halt, while also failing to address the problems that led the Court to intervene in the first place. While execution chambers remain active in several states, constitutional regulation has contributed to the death penalty's new fragility. In the next decade or two, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue, the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment. Courting Death illuminates both the promise and pitfalls of constitutional regulation of contentious social issues"-- Provided by publisher.

The starting point for this symposium is the striking punitive turn that has occurred in the United States over the past forty years—a change in public discourse and public policy that has yielded a staggering increase in the rate of incarceration, along with other dramatic changes such as the rise of the “supermax” prison, the proliferation of mandatory sentences and sentences of life without parole, the increasing treatment of juvenile offenders...

Although it is fitting to celebrate Gideon’s promise of representation for indigent criminal defendants at this landmark anniversary, it is important also to note that part of Gideon’s legacy should be our recognition of the limits of law in the fulfillment of that promise. Law’s most powerful role in the struggle to ensure adequate representation for the poor in criminal cases will be in its capacity to generate and direct the political will to produce institutional change. The critical question to ask is how law can help to move the political actors who control the power of the purse, the organization and administration of indigent defense services, and the shape of the substantive criminal law to allocate the resources and make the institutional changes that are necessary to fix what in many jurisdictions is a failing system of indigent defense. Although there is no silver bullet, there are a variety of complementary strategies that can and should be pursued. These strategies include working for legislative change to limit the scope of the substantive criminal law, promoting the success of structural reform litigation in both federal and state courts, enlisting the support of state bar overseers and associations as well as the ABA, enlisting the private defense bar and NGOs that specialize in criminal defense to set higher norms of practice, urging greater federal government involvement in promoting indigent defense reform in the states, promoting social entrepreneurship to generate creative solutions to the indigent defense crisis, and harnessing both the great power of the media to educate and motivate the public and the more targeted power of the legal academy to educate and motivate the next generation of lawyers to address this pressing problem.