Transparency and Comparative Executive Clemency: Global Lessons for Pardon Reform in the United States

This Article argues for transparency in the clemency process and contends that the concept of clemency as a benign sovereign’s “act of grace” is no longer appropriate in the modern world where executive action is subordinate to principles of constitutional due process and administrative equity. Despite calls for federal clemency reform in the United States, little comparative research examines clemency elsewhere in the common law world. This Article compares common law countries’ constitutional clemency mechanisms designed to promote openness, public and victim participation, and rational decision-making. In addition, this Article proposes four reforms to the U.S. pardon system that other English-speaking countries use, which will be explored in the four parts that follow: implementing an open decision-making structure (Part I); allowing judicial review of clemency decisions (Part II); applying freedom of information laws and reporting and publication requirements to clemency deliberations (Part III); and creating a role for victims and communities in the decision-making process (Part IV)

Human Rights Litigation and Anti-Sodomy Laws in Kenya and Botswana

In May 2019, the Kenya High Court is expected to rule on Sections 162 and 165 of the penal code, which criminalize consensual sex between two adult men. Similarly, the Botswana High Court will rule on its equivalent penal code provisions, Sections 164 and 165, in June 2019. Regardless of the outcomes of these decisions, both will contribute to a global “judicial dialogue” on the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws. In jurisdictions as diverse as Northern Ireland, Belize, Singapore, South Africa, the United States, and most recently India, courts around the world have considered whether anti-sodomy laws violate the rights to privacy and equality. International courts such as the UN Human Rights Committee, European Court of Human Rights, and Inter-American Human Rights Commission have joined the emerging soft consensus that anti-sodomy laws violate human rights. This creates an opportunity for human rights advocates to use international and comparative law as a tool to persuade more reluctant courts to reconsider the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws. Transnational organizations such as Human Dignity Trust assist local LGBT rights advocates in bringing challenges to anti-sodomy laws. In this way, human rights lawyers with these transnational organizations are affirmatively helping to “build” a global jurisprudence on human rights issues. Judges do not cite international and foreign law in a vacuum – they must be guided by advocates’ pleadings and amicus briefs. The courts in Kenya and Botswana have been presented with a range of international and domestic legal sources by both the local LGBT rights organization and transnational partners. This use of comparative and international law is a strategy that can be used in other types of human rights challenges

General relativistic neutrino transport using spectral methods

We present a new code, Lorene's Ghost (for Lorene's gravitational handling of spectral transport) developed to treat the problem of neutrino transport in supernovae with the use of spectral methods. First, we derive the expression for the nonrelativistic Liouville operator in doubly spherical coordinates (r, theta, phi, epsilon, Theta, Phi)$, and further its general relativistic counterpart. We use the 3 + 1 formalism with the conformally flat approximation for the spatial metric, to express the Liouville operator in the Eulerian frame. Our formulation does not use any approximations when dealing with the angular arguments (theta, phi, Theta, Phi), and is fully energy-dependent. This approach is implemented in a spherical shell, using either Chebyshev polynomials or Fourier series as decomposition bases. It is here restricted to simplified collision terms (isoenergetic scattering) and to the case of a static fluid. We finish this paper by presenting test results using basic configurations, including general relativistic ones in the Schwarzschild metric, in order to demonstrate the convergence properties, the conservation of particle number and correct treatment of some general-relativistic effects of our code. The use of spectral methods enables to run our test cases in a six-dimensional setting on a single processor.Comment: match published versio

Holdouts in the South Pacific: Explaining Death Penalty Retention in Papua New Guinea and Tonga

The South Pacific forms a cohesive region with broadly similar cultural attributes, legal systems and colonial histories. A comparative analysis starts from the assumption that these countries should also have similar criminal justice policies. However, until 2022, both Papua New Guinea and Tonga were retentionist death penalty outliers in the South Pacific, a region home to seven other fully abolitionist members of the United Nations. In this article, we use the comparative method to explain why Papua New Guinea and Tonga have pursued a different death penalty trajectory than their regional neighbours. Eschewing the traditional social science explanations for death penalty retention, we suggest two novel explanations for ongoing retention in Papua New Guinea and Tonga: the law and order crisis in the former and the traditionally powerful monarchy in the latter

Magnonic Charge Pumping via Spin-Orbit Coupling

The interplay between spin, charge, and orbital degrees of freedom has led to the development of spintronic devices like spin-torque oscillators, spin-logic devices, and spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access memories. In this development spin pumping, the process where pure spin-currents are generated from magnetisation precession, has proved to be a powerful method for probing spin physics and magnetisation dynamics. The effect originates from direct conversion of low energy quantised spin-waves in the magnet, known as magnons, into a flow of spins from the precessing magnet to adjacent normal metal leads. The spin-pumping phenomenon represents a convenient way to electrically detect magnetisation dynamics, however, precessing magnets have been limited so far to pump pure spin currents, which require a secondary spin-charge conversion element such as heavy metals with large spin Hall angle or multi-layer layouts to be detectable. Here, we report the experimental observation of charge pumping in which a precessing ferromagnet pumps a charge current, demonstrating direct conversion of magnons into high-frequency currents via the relativistic spin-orbit interaction. The generated electric current, differently from spin currents generated by spin-pumping, can be directly detected without the need of any additional spin to charge conversion mechanism and amplitude and phase information about the relativistic current-driven magnetisation dynamics. The charge-pumping phenomenon is generic and gives a deeper understanding of the recently observed spin-orbit torques, of which it is the reciprocal effect and which currently attract interest for their potential in manipulating magnetic information. Furthermore, charge pumping provides a novel link between magnetism and electricity and may find application in sourcing alternating electric currents.Comment: 3 figure

Tabloids--A Tool for Public Issues Education

An old-fashioned vehicle,the tabloid-format publication remains a cost-effective method for delivering public issues education. Since 1998, three high-profile public issues have been addressed in tabloids that were distributed as inserts in all the daily newspapers in Oregon. These publications, which have multiple purposes, also have multiple payoffs. Each tabloid\u27s impact is determined by the level of public interest in the issue and by how well the publication carries out its educational objectives. A carefully managed review process allows heavily entrenched factions to be successfully engaged. Significant financial as well as human resources are required for production of a public issue tabloid