1,690 research outputs found

    Atkins, Adolescence, and the Maturity Heuristic: Rationales for a Categorical Exemption for Juveniles from Capital Punishment

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    In Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court voted six to three to bar further use of the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders. The Court offered three reasons for banning the execution of the retarded. First, citing a shift in public opinion over the thirteen years since Penry v. Lynaugh, the Court in Atkins ruled that the execution of the mentally retarded is cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Second, the Court concluded that retaining the death penalty for the mentally retarded would not serve the interest in retribution or deterrence that is essential to capital jurisprudence. Atkins held that mentally retarded people lacked a range of developmental capacities necessary to establish the higher threshold of culpability for the execution of murderers that the Court had established in Furman, Gregg, Coker, Woodson, and Enmund. Third, the Atkins Court noted that the impairments of mental retardation lead to a special risk of wrongful execution. The Atkins decision, though welcomed by both popular and legal policy audiences, naturally raises the question: what about juveniles? After all, the very same limitations in developmental capacities that characterize mentally retarded defendants also characterize a significant proportion of adolescent offenders. The parallels between capital punishment for adolescents and for the mentally retarded have been echoed both in popular and legal discourse since the resumption of capital punishment following Furman. “Prior to Atkins, many groups protested the use of capital punishment for both types of offenders, invoking arguments against capital punishment that applied equally to each. The popular coupling of concerns about adolescents with concerns about the mentally retarded seemed to naturally invite an extension of the Atkins Court\u27s reasoning to juveniles by highlighting the diminished capacity for culpability common to offenders of both groups. In fact, on August 30, 2002, in a rare dissent from an order declining to stay an execution, Justices Stevens, Breyer, and Ginsburg urged the Court to reconsider the constitutionality of allowing juveniles to be sentenced to death. In reference to the Atkins decision, the Justices argued that reexamining the juvenile issue was warranted, thereby underscoring yet again the similarities between both cases

    Atkins v. Virginia: A Psychiatric Can of Worms

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    This article provides a psychiatric perspective on the problems Atkins raises for courts that handle death penalty cases. In contrast to the overarching aim of the majority\u27s opinion in Atkins - making the administration of capital punishment more equitable - the Supreme Court\u27s latest prescription of psychiatric help may only add a new layer of complexity and confusion to the already capricious process through which the U.S. criminal justice system imposes death sentences. The article briefly review\u27s the Supreme Court\u27s 1989 Penry decision, focusing on the role that evidence of mental retardation played in death penalty cases before Atkins was decided. The article then looks at how the Supreme Court majority in Atkins characterized the appellant\u27s mental condition and the diagnostic process. Subsequent sections discuss: the process of diagnosing mental retardation, the ambiguities in that process, and the way that courts and legislatures may distort clinical diagnosis for use in legal proceedings; the contradiction between professional organizations\u27 treatment of, and response to, Atkins and these organizations\u27 customary stance on the use of diagnoses for non-clinical purposes; potential implications for capital defendants with psychiatric problems as incapacitating as, or more disabling than, mental retardation; the potential effect of Atkins on testimony by mental health experts; the effect of such testimony in future death-sentencing determinations

    Atkins v. Virginia: A Psychiatric Can of Worms

    Get PDF

    Atkins v. Virginia: A Psychiatric Can of Worms

    Get PDF
    This article provides a psychiatric perspective on the problems Atkins raises for courts that handle death penalty cases. In contrast to the overarching aim of the majority\u27s opinion in Atkins - making the administration of capital punishment more equitable - the Supreme Court\u27s latest prescription of psychiatric help may only add a new layer of complexity and confusion to the already capricious process through which the U.S. criminal justice system imposes death sentences. The article briefly review\u27s the Supreme Court\u27s 1989 Penry decision, focusing on the role that evidence of mental retardation played in death penalty cases before Atkins was decided. The article then looks at how the Supreme Court majority in Atkins characterized the appellant\u27s mental condition and the diagnostic process. Subsequent sections discuss: the process of diagnosing mental retardation, the ambiguities in that process, and the way that courts and legislatures may distort clinical diagnosis for use in legal proceedings; the contradiction between professional organizations\u27 treatment of, and response to, Atkins and these organizations\u27 customary stance on the use of diagnoses for non-clinical purposes; potential implications for capital defendants with psychiatric problems as incapacitating as, or more disabling than, mental retardation; the potential effect of Atkins on testimony by mental health experts; the effect of such testimony in future death-sentencing determinations

    A Legal Obituary for Ramiro

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    Most death penalty lawyers who practice long enough will watch the execution of a client. It is always, always terrible, but not always terrible in the same way. With each client’s execution, a lawyer is confronted with the death of a human being—not an accidental death, not an inevitable death, but an avoidable one—and with his or her own failure to prevent that death. Some executions also involve a very personal loss for the lawyer because of their relationship with the client. Other executions are horrific because things go awry and impose extreme suffering on the executed individual. No matter how many times a lawyer walks that last walk with a client, it does not get easier. Each loss is different because each life is different. I have lost clients whom I have loved as friends and I have witnessed a botched execution. Ramiro Hernandez Llanas was not a friend, nor did his execution appear to cause him pain. But for me as a lawyer, his execution was the hardest. I could not save Ramiro. I could not get even one judge to care about Texas’s willingness to flout the law. This is the story of Ramiro’s case—not a famous case, but one that otherwise would be lost to history, as many outrageous applications of the death penalty are

    The Civilization of the Criminal Law

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    The boundaries of the criminal justice system are eroding. A vast amount of relatively innocuous behavior is now criminalized. The line between criminal penalties and administrative sanctions is dissolving, as criminal law relaxes its mens rea requirements and government bureaucracies aggressively pursue regulatory violations. Distinctions between criminal and civil forfeiture, contempt, and deportation proceedings have been vanishingly subtle for some time. Perhaps the most serious assault on the integrity of today\u27s criminal justice system, however, is the increasing prominence of the dangerousness criterion as justification for confinement by the government. Governmental deprivations of liberty have usually been the province of the criminal law, which is generally defined by a commitment to punishing individuals for their past acts based on the principle of just deserts. Constraints on liberty based upon dangerousness, in contrast, focus on the individual\u27s future actions. These latter types of interventions contemplate neither punishment nor an assessment of blameworthiness for previous conduct, and thus directly flout the traditional premises of criminal justice. This Article contends, contrary to the views of most legal commentators, that this development ought to be encouraged. The criminal law ought to embrace the dangerousness criterion, with the significant caveat that it do so wholeheartedly rather than in the halting manner it has exhibited to date. The punishment model of criminal justice that views desert, general deterrence, or inculcation of good character (or some combination of these three) as the primary objective of criminal justice should be discarded, and individual prevention should become the predominant goal of the criminal justice system

    Preventive Justice: How Algorithms Parole Boards, and Limiting Retributivism Could End Mass Incarceration

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    A number of states use statistically derived algorithms to provide estimates of the risk of reoffending. In theory, these risk assessment instruments could bring significant benefits. Fewer people of all ethnicities would be put in jail prior to trial and in prison after conviction, the duration of sentences would be reduced for low-risk offenders, and treatment resources would be more efficiently allocated. As a result, the capital outlays for prisons and jails would be substantially reduced. The public would continue to be protected from the most dangerous individuals, while lower-risk individuals would be less subject to the criminogenic effects of incarceration and better positioned to build and maintain a life outside of jail or prison that does not involve criminal activity. Risk assessment instruments cannot fully realize these benefits, however, unless the currently popular determinate sentencing structure that exists in most states is dramatically altered. Today, determinate sentencing states give almost all sentencing power to prosecutors, who in essence fix the sentence range through charging practices, and judges, who decide where within the range the sentence will fall and occasionally select a sentence outside that range. The result is that even an offender who poses a low risk of reoffending will often receive a lengthy sentence of imprisonment

    Contemplations and discussions on the quality of forensic assessment in sentencing:Puzzling pieces for decision makers

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    In essence, forensic assessment is labour of a diagnostic nature. This chapter discusses the origins of forensic assessment, types, and measures of quality and possible biases that come with the legal context. It focuses on the most common psycholegal concepts relevant for the quality of forensic assessment in sentencing will be described respectively: mental disorder, criminal responsibility, and dangerousness. Risk assessment is often informed by the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model. Structured guidelines for risk assessment exist in various forms. Roughly two main categories of tools can be divided: actuarial measures and those following a structured professional judgement (SPJ) approach. Both kinds of tools include a list of factors that have empirically been shown to be related to an increased likelihood of future offending. Generally, personalised interventions and risk-management as offered in a forensic treatment setting are much more effective in terms of recidivism reduction than harsh punishments and lengthy prison sentences

    Spatial Event Analysis Tool: An Application for Mapping Terrorists\u27 Events

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    The Spatial Event Analysis Tool is an application to assist United States Army scenario developers who are charged with creating realistic and accurate settings, or story lines, for Army experimentation events. The application focuses on terrorist events reported in newspaper articles and are readily available on the internet. In the past, these reports have been overlooked because their locations are difficult to geocode in a GIS. However, when this information is structured, categorized, with even a general location, tremendous value will be derived through spatial analysis of terrorist events. In Army experiments, this allows for a temporal understanding of how and where terrorist organizations operate. It also aids in identifying trends in terrorist activities. For participants in Army experiments, the application can serve as a decision support tool that will aid in developing alternative methods to confront terrorist organizations. Most importantly it will allow experiment participants to study nontraditional problem sets with which the Army’s leadership is increasingly confronted
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