When Police Volunteer to Kill

The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection, yet states continue to struggle with drug shortages and botched executions. Some states have authorized alternative methods of execution, including the firing squad. Utah, which has consistently carried out firing squad executions throughout its history, relies on police officers from the jurisdiction where the crime took place to volunteer to carry out these executions. This represents a plausible--and probable--method for other states in conducting firing squad executions. Public and academic discussion of the firing squad has centered on questions of pain and suffering. It has not engaged with the consequences of relying on police officers as executioners. Police participation in executions deserves the same scrutiny as physician participation in executions. Using police officers as executioners is inconsistent with the normative and idealized functions of policing, but consistent with the culture and powers of policing. This Article explores the potential consequences of using police officers as executioners. Relying on police officers as executioners will destabilize policing because it encourages negative aspects of policing culture and undermines officers\u27 ability to work within their communities. This practice also risks adding impermissible features to executions, further undermining the retributive justifications for capital punishment. Using police officers from the jurisdiction where the crime occurred has a significant association with retributive and expressive functions of punishment. Pain alone should not be the primary way to assess the constitutionality of an execution. The Eighth Amendment prohibits punishment that fails to serve legitimate purposes. The Supreme Court has justified capital punishment as an expression of a community\u27s moral outrage and a way to preserve the legitimacy of the justice system by preventing vigilantism and mob violence. This means that punishment must not be undertaken in a way that endorses vigilantism and vengeance. Relying on police officers as executioners in firing squads illustrates that the search for a less painful method of execution may not be without its own serious constitutional defects

A Power-Law Analysis of the Uneven Geographic Distribution of Executions in the Post-Furman Era of the Death Penalty

In 1972 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the application of the death penalty was arbitrary and capricious, and placed a hold on executions until states could prove they had created a more consistent system for death sentencing. By 1976, 37 states had reenacted the death penalty under the claim that they had created a more consistent method. However, current statistics on the application of the death penalty in the United States show that racial and geographic inequity remains the status quo. Although a large amount of research concerning racial inequity in the imposition of capital punishment in the United States exists, statistical analysis and data on the extent of geographic inequality remains limited. The 1972 Furman majority opinion explains “that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed”. Thus, the United States Supreme Court ruled that executions be postponed until the creation and implementation of a less arbitrary system of imposing death. Since 1976, 1,373 individuals have been executed in the United States under the promise that the post-Furman capital punishment system is no longer unfairly distributed. However, an overview of literature on the death penalty trends, combined with new statistics on homicides and executions in the United States1 supports three hypotheses contrary to the concept that capital punishment is operating within an equitable system in the post-Furman era due to the severe unequal geographic distributions that define execution patterns since 1977. Hypothesis #1: A large majority of executions occur in a very small number of counties and many counties have few or no executions. Hypothesis #2: The geographic distribution of executions follows a power-law, suggesting that the outcome of capital punishment cases is heavily correlated with the location of the trial due to historical developments. This remains true even when possible lurking variables are controlled, including population and homicide numbers. Hypothesis #3: This geographic inequality is a result of the existence of a self-perpetuating local legal culture that either promotes or prohibits executions2. An overview of previously published research on the distribution of executions in combination with previously unpublished statistical analysis using an original dataset will illustrate the large inequalities in the geographic distribution of executions within United States. The unequal geographic distribution of executions in America is especially striking when examined through the lens of the 8th Amendment due to its severe nature and unusual geographic pattern. The fact that the death penalty continues to persist in such an unequal manner not only violates the 14th Amendment right to “equal protection of the laws” but also violates the 1972 United States Supreme Court Furman ruling that the death penalty not be imposed in an unequal or biased manner.Bachelor of Art

The [Capital] Punishment Fits The Crime: A Comparative Analysis Of The Death Penalty And Proportionality In The United States Of America And The People\u27s Republic Of China

The governments of both the United States and China maintain the death penalty as a means of punishing its most dangerous criminals, but with an astounding 68 capital offenses, China perennially remains the world leader in executions. This article examines the theory of proportionality of criminal punishment and how it relates to the respective death penalty policies in the United States and China. A comparative analysis will reveal two extremely different societies with two different perspectives on proportionality. one that recognizes and protects fundamental freedoms and another that places emphasis on collective societal welfare over individual rights. The article will describe how constitutional and legislative provisions, specific historical periods, human rights, and the judicial system interact to shape the policies that the United States and China practice today

The Geographic Distribution of US Executions

We review statistical patterns of the geographic distribution of US executions, compare them to homicides, and demonstrate extremely high degrees of concentration of executions in the modern period compared to previous historical periods. We further show that this unprecedented level of concentration has been increasing over the past 20 years. We demonstrate that it is virtually uncorrelated with factors related to homicides. Finally, we show that it corresponds to a statistical distribution associated with “self-reinforcing” processes: a power-law or exponential distribution. These findings stand whether we look at individual counties within death-penalty states, across the 50 states of the United States, or look at the international distribution of executions across countries in recent years. The substantive conclusion from the statistical patterns observed is that these cannot be explained merely by random variation around some general average. Rather, localities start down a path, then are reinforced in their pathways. There appears to be little to no logic about why certain counties are the high-use counties, whereas the vast majority have never executed a single individual in 40 years of experience with the modern death penalty, often in spite of thousands of homicides. Our research indicates that a main determinant of whether an individual will be executed is not the crime they commit, but the jurisdiction’s experience with executing others. This is not acceptable—legally, morally, or constitutionally

Life After Death Row: Preventing Wrongful Capital Convictions and Restoring Innocence After Exoneration

In Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court overturned its ruling in Furman v. Georgia and held that the death penalty, as administered by the states, was not per se cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.\u27 Yet errors continue to occur at an alarming rate in the capital punishment system-over one hundred death row inmates have been released pursuant to evidence of actual innocence since 1973. Indeed, the number of death row exonerations has been steadily increasing in recent years. Of those exonerations, DNA testing played a substantial role in twelve. Many more have benefited from the assistance of innocence projects funded and operated by private groups. The role of these groups, combined with increased media attention to recent prison and death row releases, has contributed to a resurgence in the public debate over the role of the death penalty in the American criminal justice system. A 1993 study showed that fifty-eight percent of voters were concerned about the danger of mistaken executions. This percentage has risen steadily in recent years as the number of exonerations has increased. In May 2001, a Gallup Poll indicated that overall public support for the death penalty has eroded from eighty percent to sixty-five percent since 1994. In addition, an ABC news poll found that fifty-one percent of Americans support a nationwide moratorium on capital punishment while a commission studies its fairness. The number of inmates on death row and the number of executions have both been similarly decreasing, although it is unclear whether the decreases are related. For the first time since 1976, fewer executions have been occurring each year, even in leading death penalty states. This decrease is likely due to both a reduction in the crime rate and decreased public support for the death penalty. While there has been a sharp decrease in executions in recent years, the number of inmates on death row nationwide continued to increase until very recently. Significant systemic reforms have not accompanied the shift in public opinion concerning the death penalty. Neither death penalty statutes nor the manner in which the courts address capital cases has changed significantly in tandem with shifting public support. In fact, most recent exonerations have resulted from inmates\u27 determined insistence on DNA testing and the intervention of private advocacy groups, rather than from changes in the prosecution of capital cases or in the administration of the death penalty. In other words, innocents\u27 avoidance of execution has often been the outcome of nothing more than a fortunate convergence of unusual circumstances. The criminal justice system is not preventing wrongful executions--private citizens are

The Culture of Capital Punishment in Japan

This open access book provides a comparative perspective on capital punishment in Japan and the United States. Alongside the US, Japan is one of only a few developed democracies in the world which retains capital punishment and continues to carry out executions on a regular basis. There are some similarities between the two systems of capital punishment but there are also many striking differences. These include differences in capital jurisprudence, execution method, the nature and extent of secrecy surrounding death penalty deliberations and executions, institutional capacities to prevent and discover wrongful convictions, orientations to lay participation and to victim participation, and orientations to “democracy” and governance. Johnson also explores several fundamental issues about the ultimate criminal penalty, such as the proper role of citizen preferences in governing a system of punishment and the relevance of the feelings of victims and survivors.

Should We Learn Probabilistic Models for Model Checking? A New Approach and An Empirical Study

Many automated system analysis techniques (e.g., model checking, model-based testing) rely on first obtaining a model of the system under analysis. System modeling is often done manually, which is often considered as a hindrance to adopt model-based system analysis and development techniques. To overcome this problem, researchers have proposed to automatically "learn" models based on sample system executions and shown that the learned models can be useful sometimes. There are however many questions to be answered. For instance, how much shall we generalize from the observed samples and how fast would learning converge? Or, would the analysis result based on the learned model be more accurate than the estimation we could have obtained by sampling many system executions within the same amount of time? In this work, we investigate existing algorithms for learning probabilistic models for model checking, propose an evolution-based approach for better controlling the degree of generalization and conduct an empirical study in order to answer the questions. One of our findings is that the effectiveness of learning may sometimes be limited.Comment: 15 pages, plus 2 reference pages, accepted by FASE 2017 in ETAP

IST Austria Thesis

The design and verification of concurrent systems remains an open challenge due to the non-determinism that arises from the inter-process communication. In particular, concurrent programs are notoriously difficult both to be written correctly and to be analyzed formally, as complex thread interaction has to be accounted for. The difficulties are further exacerbated when concurrent programs get executed on modern-day hardware, which contains various buffering and caching mechanisms for efficiency reasons. This causes further subtle non-determinism, which can often produce very unintuitive behavior of the concurrent programs. Model checking is at the forefront of tackling the verification problem, where the task is to decide, given as input a concurrent system and a desired property, whether the system satisfies the property. The inherent state-space explosion problem in model checking of concurrent systems causes naïve explicit methods not to scale, thus more inventive methods are required. One such method is stateless model checking (SMC), which explores in memory-efficient manner the program executions rather than the states of the program. State-of-the-art SMC is typically coupled with partial order reduction (POR) techniques, which argue that certain executions provably produce identical system behavior, thus limiting the amount of executions one needs to explore in order to cover all possible behaviors. Another method to tackle the state-space explosion is symbolic model checking, where the considered techniques operate on a succinct implicit representation of the input system rather than explicitly accessing the system. In this thesis we present new techniques for verification of concurrent systems. We present several novel POR methods for SMC of concurrent programs under various models of semantics, some of which account for write-buffering mechanisms. Additionally, we present novel algorithms for symbolic model checking of finite-state concurrent systems, where the desired property of the systems is to ensure a formally defined notion of fairness

Creating Momentum: The Atlantic Philanthropies' Investments to Repeal the Death Penalty in the United States

The Atlantic Philanthropies invested about $60 million between 2004 and 2016 to support efforts to repeal the death penalty in the United States. To assess the effectiveness of this work and to generate lessons for human rights activists and other funders involved in the repeal movement, the foundation commissioned this evaluation. The findings contained in this report are the result of extensive documentation review as well as interviews with foundation and grantee board and staff