Does the Death Penalty Still Matter: Reflections of a Death Row Lawyer

This talk was given by Professor David Bruck for the Frances Lewis Law Center at Washington and Lee University School of Law, April, 2002. It is a follow-up to “Does the Death Penalty Matter?,” given by Professor Bruck as the 1990 Ralph E. Shikes Lecture at Harvard Law School

Emergency Parole Release for Older Parole-Eligible DOC Inmates

Professor Bruck writes to Secretary Moran and Chairwoman Bennett to urge them to protect elderly Virginia prison inmates from the risk of death from COVID-19 by granting immediate parole release to as many over-60 parole-eligible prisoners as possible, upon a showing that they are at low risk to re-offend, and have a supportive home to go to once released

A Tribute to William S. Geimer

A Tribute to William S. Geimer Meredith Susan Palmer* * Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Admissions, Washington and Lee University School of Law, J.D., 1985, Washington and Lee University. Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.1 Bill Geimer is not a man of material things. But somehow, in the material things that he chose to have around him - the mementos, the odd souvenirs, the offerings from students, clients, friends - I find the story of the man, the teacher, and the lawyer Bill Geimer is to me. In my mind's eye, I see Bill's office here at Washington and Lee as I first saw it, as a hesitant first-year law student approaching the sanctum sanctorum of a faculty member. There is a desktop name plate, regular Army issue, decorated with grenades or something equally militaristic and intimidating. But next to that is a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, with his stirring words evoking hope for justice and freedom on earth. And next to that, a membership certificate for the Lawyer's Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, and a drawing of Quijote, lance raised to a windmill. How could this be? While reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable is the everyday task of the law student, no trick of logic could make these disparate pieces fit; one simply had to get to know the man. That one could do so as a law student is itself part of what defines Bill Geimer. The student who came to know Bill heard a story of a kid from the rural south, off to a small state university to play basketball but who, like countless kids before him, spent a bit more time playing than studying. Come Graduation Day, with no game plan, he joined Uncle Sam's family. A grounding in tanks, guns, and tactics preceded duty with the military police, but something else happened during those years. Assigned to assist with an investigation, he finds an aptitude for the law, an appreciation of justice, and a burning sense of the unfairness of justice denied. The young man who returned from service to go on to a distinguished career as a law student at the University of North Carolina was a man with a game plan, and a mission. It was no surprise that Bill's mission as a lawyer was not in the office towers of Atlanta or the corporate boardrooms of Wall Street, but among the plain folks of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and later in the community of migrant farm labor working and living hard under the hot Carolina sun. I see another memento, this time in Bill's home. It's an odd piece of, well, let's call it folk art. Crudely carved, frankly ugly. Taste is a delicate thing, so one observes diplomatically that it is an "interesting" object. There's a story, of course, a story of a client for whom Bill had worked, putting together the paperwork to get a fledgling arts-and-crafts shop off the ground. This client, like many Bill served, claimed not to have the cash to pay. But, the client said, he could give Bill this valuable piece of work. Barter being a fundamentally more honest exchange and thus appealing to Bill, the transaction was concluded. Not until Bill brought his sculpture home did he discover the price tag stuck to the underside, for something substantially less than the agreed-upon fee. He kept the awkward thing, price tag intact, I think as a reminder of his own fallibility, of the ingenuity of the ordinary man, and of the need to forget neither. Another memento, in some ways the most important to this former student, is a large, faded, well-handled poster on the professor's office door. A young man in Carolina Blue goes up for a shot, stretching for the basket, with seconds left on the clock. Anyone who knows Bill Geimer knows that he is devoted to Carolina basketball. In fact, Bill may have spent so much time watching the Tar Heels play that he began to confuse teaching with coaching. As a former student of Bill's, I'm not sure that was a bad thing.

Large-scale cosmological perturbations on the brane

In brane-world cosmologies of Randall-Sundrum type, we show that evolution of large-scale curvature perturbations may be determined on the brane, without solving the bulk perturbation equations. The influence of the bulk gravitational field on the brane is felt through a projected Weyl tensor which behaves effectively like an imperfect radiation fluid with anisotropic stress. We define curvature perturbations on uniform density surfaces for both the matter and Weyl fluids, and show that their evolution on large scales follows directly from the energy conservation equations for each fluid. The total curvature perturbation is not necessarily constant for adiabatic matter perturbations, but can change due to the Weyl entropy perturbation. To relate this curvature perturbation to the longitudinal gauge metric potentials requires knowledge of the Weyl anisotropic stress which is not determined by the equations on the brane. We discuss the implications for large-angle anisotropies on the cosmic microwave background sky.Comment: 13 pages, latex with revtex, no figure

Cosmic vorticity on the brane

We study vector perturbations about four-dimensional brane-world cosmologies embedded in a five-dimensional vacuum bulk. Even in the absence of matter perturbations, vector perturbations in the bulk metric can support vector metric perturbations on the brane. We show that during de Sitter inflation on the brane vector perturbations in the bulk obey the same wave equation for a massless five-dimensional field as found for tensor perturbations. However, we present the second-order effective action for vector perturbations and find no normalisable zero-mode in the absence of matter sources. The spectrum of normalisable states is a continuum of massive modes that remain in the vacuum state during inflation.Comment: 10 pages, latex with revtex. Expanded discussion of observational effects and minor corrections. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Visualizing peripheral nerve regeneration by whole mount staining.

Peripheral nerve trauma triggers a well characterised sequence of events both proximal and distal to the site of injury. Axons distal to the injury degenerate, Schwann cells convert to a repair supportive phenotype and macrophages enter the nerve to clear myelin and axonal debris. Following these events, axons must regrow through the distal part of the nerve, re-innervate and finally are re-myelinated by Schwann cells. For nerve crush injuries (axonotmesis), in which the integrity of the nerve is maintained, repair may be relatively effective whereas for nerve transection (neurotmesis) repair will likely be very poor as few axons may be able to cross between the two parts of the severed nerve, across the newly generated nerve bridge, to enter the distal stump and regenerate. Analysing axon growth and the cell-cell interactions that occur following both nerve crush and cut injuries has largely been carried out by staining sections of nerve tissue, but this has the obvious disadvantage that it is not possible to follow the paths of regenerating axons in three dimensions within the nerve trunk or nerve bridge. To try and solve this problem, we describe the development and use of a novel whole mount staining protocol that allows the analysis of axonal regeneration, Schwann cell-axon interaction and re-vascularisation of the repairing nerve following nerve cut and crush injuries

Cognitive skills and literacy performance of Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and to assess how these abilities were associated with Chinese word reading, word dictation, and reading comprehension. The cognitive skills of interest were morphological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, and verbal working memory. A total of 90 junior secondary school students, 30 dyslexic, 30 chronological age controls, and 30 reading level controls was tested on a range of cognitive and literacy tasks. Dyslexic students were less competent than the control students in all cognitive and literacy measures. The regression analyses also showed that verbal working memory, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and visual-orthographic knowledge were significantly associated with literacy performance. Findings underscore the importance of these cognitive skills for Chinese literacy acquisition. Overall, this study highlights the persistent difficulties of Chinese dyslexic adolescents who seem to have multiple causes for reading and spelling difficulties