Mend It or End It?: The Revised ABA Capital Defense Representation Guidelines as an Opportunity to Reconsider the Death Penalty

The revised edition of the ABA\u27s Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases offers a lens through which to consider whether retention of capital punishment is sensible public policy. A reader of the Guidelines finds that the current death penalty system is characterized by severely impaired clients, pervasive racism, a structural bias in favor of guilty verdicts, less effective counsel than in non-capital cases, and a dysfunctional system of post-conviction review. No amount of money can solve these problems; at best, sufficient expenditures can ameliorate them. But making even that attempt will be costly - not just because of the amounts spent, but because those amounts are likely to be diverted from structural improvements that would produce tangible benefits to the criminal justice system as a whole. As the states consider this situation, perhaps an unintended but welcome effect of the Guidelines\u27 stark portrayal of the realities confronting them will be to prompt a re-consideration of the choice to have a death penalty at all

Fewer Risks, More Benefits: What Governments Gain by Acknowledging the Right to Competent Counsel on State Post-Conviction Review in Capital Cases

The acknowledgment that there is a right to the effective assistance of counsel in state post-conviction proceedings would serve the interests of the state and federal governments. Most death penalty states have already decided to provide capital post-conviction counsel but by failing to insist that the representation be competent they have forfeited procedural advantages they would otherwise enjoy in federal habeas corpus litigation, shifted unwarranted costs to the federal government, incurred serious litigation risks for the future, and impaired both the efficiency and the fairness of their systems of criminal justice

Construction of the de Sitter supergravity

Recently, the complete action for an N=1 pure supergravity action in 4 dimensions that allows a positive, negative or zero cosmological constant has been constructed. The action is the generalization of a Volkov-Akulov action for the Goldstino coupled to supergravity. The construction uses a nilpotent multiplet. This paper is written in honour of Philippe Spindel. AVP enjoyed collaborations and many interactions with Philippe, who has always appreciated very precise derivations. We use this occasion to give a very detailed account of the calculations that lead to the published results. We review aspects of supersymmetry with de Sitter backgrounds, the treatment of auxiliary fields, and other ingredients in the construction.Comment: contribution to the proceedings of the workshop "About various kinds of interactions" in honor of Philippe Spindel; v2: changed references, and correction of torsion lagrangian (5.15