Capital Punishment Clinic

For one day in the 2019–2020 academic year, Harvard Law Today followed just a handful of Harvard Law's 47 legal clinics to see their work — and their efforts to advance justice — in action.

Led by Carol Steiker, the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program, the Capital Punishment Clinic at Harvard Law School tests the complex body of constitutional law that regulates the death penalty and its troubled history.

More than 100 years after students started the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, there are now 40 clinics and Student Practice Organizations at HLS, focused on everything from cyberlaw to veterans’ rights.

A study on capital punishment co-authored by Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker ’86 and her brother Jordan Steiker ’88 a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, was influential in Connecticut’s recent decision to abolish the death penalty in that state.

On March 6, Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice hosted Dying While Black and Brown, a dance performance focused on capital punishment and the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated people of color. The performance was first commissioned by the San Francisco Equal Justice Society as part of the society’s campaign to restore 14th Amendment protections for victims of discrimination, including those on death row.

An essay, Why Death Penalty Opponents Are Closer to Their Goal Than They Realize, by HLS Professor Carol Steiker ’86, appeared in the Sept. 27 edition of The New Republic. The essay focuses on the decline of the death penalty in practice, politics and law, and how the present moment brings the genuine possibility of permanent abolition via judicial decision.

An essay,  "Don't Blame Perry for Texas's Execution Addiction. He Doesn't Have Much To Do With It," by HLS Professor Carol Steiker ’86 and her brother, Professor Jordan Steiker '88 of the University of Texas School of Law appeared in the Sept. 2 edition of The New Republic. The essay focuses on the relationship between Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry and Texas's standing as the execution capital of the United States.