Carol Steiker

Twenty states and the District of Columbia have abolished capital punishment. Four more have imposed a moratorium on executions. ... A new geography of capital punishment is taking shape, with just 2 percent of the nation’s counties now accounting for a majority of the people sitting on death row. ... “Racism is the historical force that has most deeply marked the American death pen­alty,” says Carol Steiker, a Harvard law professor and an author of the forthcoming book “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment From Colonial Days to the Present.”

...During the controversy, [Bryan] Stevenson visited the University of Texas Law School, in Austin, for a conference on the relationship between the death penalty and lynching. Jordan Steiker, the professor who convened the meeting, told me, “In one sense, the death penalty is clearly a substitute for lynching. One of the main justifications for the use of the death penalty, especially in the South, was that it served to avoid lynching. The number of people executed rises tremendously at the end of the lynching era. And there’s still incredible overlap between places that had lynching and places that continue to use the death penalty.” Drawing on the work of such noted legal scholars as David Garland and Franklin Zimring, Steiker and his sister Carol, a professor at Harvard Law School, have written a forthcoming book, “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment,” which explores the links between lynching and state-sponsored executions. The Steikers write, “The practice of lynching constituted ‘a form of unofficial capital punishment’ that in its heyday was even more common than the official kind.”

A week after Harvard Law School’s seal change became final, a group of faculty members are publicly speaking out in support of Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, charging that student activists at the school have not given her due credit for her efforts to address racial issues on campus. Seven Law School faculty members—Glenn Cohen, Randall L. Kennedy, Richard J. Lazarus, Todd D. Rakoff, Carol S. Steiker, Kristen A. Stilt, and David B. Wilkins—published an open letter in the Harvard Law Record Monday defending Minow. They wrote, “Our goal here is… to express our support and deep appreciation for Dean Minow and all that she has done during this difficult and important process, and to advance the cause of justice throughout her long and distinguished career.”

When starting a semester, Harvard Law School (HLS) Professor Carol Steiker likes to ask her first-year criminal law students to describe what they think are the biggest societal changes of the past 40 years. The students often cite the rise of social media, or global warming, or same-sex marriage. Then it’s Steiker’s turn. “I show them the statistics,” said Steiker, the School’s Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law, “and they are stunned.” Her numbers show mass incarceration in the United States...The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, enacted a sweeping revision of the criminal code. The legislation established the U.S. Sentencing Commission and tasked it with providing guidelines to federal courts — a radical shift in policy, since judges previously had wide discretion in sentencing. The commission introduced mandatory sentencing for various crimes and eliminated federal parole for some cases, immediately boosting prison rolls. Instead of improving fairness in sentencing, as was intended, the new system wound up promoting inequality, says HLS lecturer Nancy Gertner, herself a former federal judge. Judges suddenly had to hand down standard sentences to those convicted of some specified crimes who had particular criminal histories...In addition, court systems around the country increasingly are outsourcing their probation operations to private firms that make money by charging offenders extra fees. “The private company may have little or no interest in achieving justice,” said Jacob Lipton, who leads Harvard’s Systemic Justice Project along with HLS Professor Jon Hanson.

With the United States incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other nation on earth, a prison population that is larger than at any time in our history, and vast racial disparities in incarceration rates for African-Americans and whites, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch ’81, J.D. ’84, called criminal-justice reform “a transformative issue of our generation” in a talk Wednesday at Harvard Law School (HLS). The system is not only about litigating cases, but “just as important, how do we prevent people from interacting with the criminal-justice system? How do we stop them from making the mistakes that lead them into our system? And then, when individuals have served their debt to society, how do we make sure that they have a way to go home to their families, to their communities, to become productive citizens?” Lynch said during a conversation with Carol Steiker, the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law and Special Adviser for Public Service at HLS.

A new program at Harvard Law School (HLS) aims to help reform the nation’s criminal justice system, with assistance from Harvard students and faculty. The program’s executive director is Larry Schwartztol, who has been a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. Schwartztol has worked on issues including racial justice, policing in schools, educational equality, and economic justice concerns involving the home foreclosure crisis and discriminatory lending practices. When he decided to attend Yale Law School Schwartztol said, “I wanted to find ways to use the law as a vehicle for social justice.”...Our mission is to help advance criminal justice reform by bringing rigorous and creative legal thinking to bear on hard, cutting-edge policy problems. The program builds on an incredible infrastructure already at the Law School. I work with the two faculty directors, Carol Steiker and Alex Whiting, and we are excited about bringing together our own mix of backgrounds in doing this type of work.

...But how close is the Court to actually ruling capital punishment unconstitutional? MPR News' Kerri Miller spoke to David von Drehel, Time Magazine editor-at-large, and Carol S. Streiker, professor of law at Harvard Law School, about the realities of the issue. Drehel is the author of "Among the Lowest of the Dead," a history of the modern death penalty. "I would say within 20 years, absolutely," Streiker said of the end of capital punishment. Drehel and Streiker discussed many of the issues that would contribute to such a ruling.

Emily Rooney and Adam Reilly of WGBH News have the latest in the ongoing Tsarnaev trial. Lawyer and professor at Harvard Law, Carol Steiker, who has argued death row cases before the Supreme Court; criminal defense attorney, Robert Sheketoff, who represented Gary Lee Sampson; and former U.S. Attorney, Michael Sullivan share their first hand experience and insight on the death penalty.

Twelve jurors in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will soon face one of the most profound decisions related to civic duty, yet their task next week seems remarkably simple: Vote on the guilt of a defendant who has virtually admitted he committed the crimes. A verdict seems possible within minutes. But legal specialists say that such a swift verdict in the first part of a two-stage death penalty trial related to the Boston Marathon bombing is unlikely...Harvard Law professor Carol Steiker, who has done extensive research on capital cases, also said that even though the jury is supposed to consider only Tsarnaev’s guilt at this phase, many jurors may use some time this week to consciously — or unconsciously — process their thoughts about the next phase, when jurors will decide whether Tsarnaev should be executed for his crimes. “I’m sure they’ll be thinking about it, even if the judge says not to do it,” she said.

Faced with dwindling sources for execution drugs and a pending Supreme Court review of the constitutionality of using the tranquilizer midazolam, some death penalty states are looking back to the future for alternative methods of killing inmates. ...Harvard law professor Carol Steiker said recently she believes the death penalty may be on its way out, but not for another decade or so. "It would not surprise me if the death penalty were constitutionally invalidated sometime in the next couple of decades," she said. "The Supreme Court has been on a trajectory of narrowing and questioning the death penalty. In 2002, it held that people with mental retardation, now called intellectual disability, couldn’t get the death penalty. In 2005, it held that juvenile offenders couldn’t get the death penalty. In 2008, it held that people who commit crimes other than murder — even the crime of aggravated rape of a child — couldn’t get the death penalty. These are really significant limitations on capital punishment."

Carol Steiker’s interest in criminal justice took hold while she was at Harvard Law School (HLS) in the 1980s. While studying there, she recalled, “It began to appear to me that criminal justice was a great engine of American inequality.” Steiker became interested in capital punishment while clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, an ardent opponent of the death penalty. Now the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at HLS, Steiker is using her year as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Rita E. Hauser Fellow to work with her brother and frequent collaborator, Jordan M. Steiker, on a book about the past half-century’s experiment with the constitutional regulation of capital punishment in America. She spoke with the Gazette about the history and future of the death penalty in the United States.