The Fourth Circuit\u27s Doube-Edged Sword : Eviscerating the Right to Present Mitigating Evidence and Beheading the Right to the Assistance of Counsel

Even before the sea change of Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court recognized not only an indigent’s right to the assistance of counsel in capital cases, but also his right to the effective assistance of counsel in capital cases. Since those auspicious beginnings, the Court has dramatically broadened the right to present mitigating evidence in the sentencing phase of a capital trial, thereby increasing the need for the guiding hand of counsel in capital sentencing. Thus, it is particularly tragic that the Fourth Circuit’s swiftly evolving approach to the prejudice prong of the ineffective assistance of counsel standard precludes capital defendants from winning ineffective assistance of counsel claims in the very cases where informed and effective assistance would have been most likely to have made a difference. According to the Fourth Circuit, all psychologically based mitigating evidence is a “two-edged sword,” because “although ‘evidence of a defendant’s mental impairment may diminish his blameworthiness for his crime,’ it also may ‘indicate that there is a probability that he will be dangerous in the future.” Thus for habeas petitioners in the Fourth Circuit, the possibility, however remote, that a jury would focus on dangerousness rather than culpability precludes ever winning an ineffective assistance of counsel based upon the failure to present psychologically-based mitigating evidence, no matter how compelling the neglected evidence is, or how derelict counsel was in failing to present that evidence. As this Article will demonstrate, the double-edged sword doctrine is wrong-headed in several respects. This Article hopes to persuade the reader that despite its newness, it is a doctrine already ripe for overruling—or reversal, if necessary. Part I briefly describes the capital defendant’s right to have available mitigating evidence presented to the sentencing body; the real dimensions of this right can properly be understood only by considering both the breadth of the abstract right to present mitigating evidence and the limitations imposed by the interaction of that right with the ineffective assistance of counsel doctrine. Part II describes how the Fourth Circuit’s double-edged sword doctrine departs from established doctrine and diminishes established rights. Part III presents the conceptual and empirical fallacies of the Fourth Circuit’s approach

War, Insurgency, and Terrorism: A Conversation on Commonalities and Contrasts in the Political Uses of Violence

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, streaming vide

Exobiology: The NASA program

The goal of NASA's Exobiology Program is to understand the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. To do this, the Exobiology Program seeks to provide a critical framework and some key research to allow NASA to bear the combined talents and capabilities of the agency and the scientific community, and the unique opportunities afforded by space exploration. To provide structure and direction to the quest for answers, the Exobiology Program has instituted a comprehensive research program divided into four elements which are being implemented at several of NASA's research centers and in the university community. These program elements correspond to the four major epochs in the evolution of living systems: (1) cosmic evolution of the biogenic compounds; (2) prebiotic evolution; (3) origin and early evolution of life; and (4) evolution of advanced life. The overall research program is designed to trace the pathways leading from the origin of the universe through the major epochs in the story of life

Ceramic component reliability with the restructured NASA/CARES computer program

The Ceramics Analysis and Reliability Evaluation of Structures (CARES) integrated design program on statistical fast fracture reliability and monolithic ceramic components is enhanced to include the use of a neutral data base, two-dimensional modeling, and variable problem size. The data base allows for the efficient transfer of element stresses, temperatures, and volumes/areas from the finite element output to the reliability analysis program. Elements are divided to insure a direct correspondence between the subelements and the Gaussian integration points. Two-dimensional modeling is accomplished by assessing the volume flaw reliability with shell elements. To demonstrate the improvements in the algorithm, example problems are selected from a round-robin conducted by WELFEP (WEakest Link failure probability prediction by Finite Element Postprocessors)

If You Can't Trust the Farmer, Who Can You Trust? The Effect of Certification Types on Purchases of Organic Produce

An information asymmetry exists in the market for organic produce since consumers cannot determine whether produce is organically or conventionally grown. Various methods may solve this problem including signaling, reputation, and certification. Signaling and reputation may not work well, because signals are noisy, and reputation may be difficult for a producer to establish. Certification of the farm and its growing methods shows the most promise. A survey instrument testing the efficacy of certification is presented along with empirical analysis suggesting that no notable difference existed between independent certification methods, although independent certification had significantly different effects than self-certification.Asymmetric information, Certification, Ordered probit, Organic produce, Agribusiness,

GEMINI: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding

Gemini is a natural language understanding system developed for spoken language applications. The paper describes the architecture of Gemini, paying particular attention to resolving the tension between robustness and overgeneration. Gemini features a broad-coverage unification-based grammar of English, fully interleaved syntactic and semantic processing in an all-paths, bottom-up parser, and an utterance-level parser to find interpretations of sentences that might not be analyzable as complete sentences. Gemini also includes novel components for recognizing and correcting grammatical disfluencies, and for doing parse preferences. This paper presents a component-by-component view of Gemini, providing detailed relevant measurements of size, efficiency, and performance.Comment: 8 pages, postscrip

The Cell Wall Teichuronic Acid Synthetase (TUAS) Is an Enzyme Complex Located in the Cytoplasmic Membrane of Micrococcus luteus

The cell wall teichuronic acid (TUA) of Micrococcus luteus is a long-chain polysaccharide composed of disaccharide repeating units [-4-β-D-ManNAcAp-(1→6)α-D-Glcp−1-]n, which is covalently anchored to the peptidoglycan on the inner cell wall and extended to the outer surface of the cell envelope. An enzyme complex responsible for the TUA chain biosynthesis was purified and characterized. The 440kDa enzyme complex, named teichuronic acid synthetase (TUAS), is an octomer composed of two kinds of glycosyltransferases, Glucosyltransferase, and ManNAcA-transferase, which is capable of catalyzing the transfer of disaccharide glycosyl residues containing both glucose and the N-acetylmannosaminuronic acid residues. TUAS displays hydrophobic properties and is found primarily associated with the cytoplasmic membrane. The purified TUAS contains carotinoids and lipids. TUAS activity is diminished by phospholipase digestion. We propose that TUAS serves as a multitasking polysaccharide assembling station on the bacterial membrane.National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Public Health Service Grants AI-08295); American Lung Association (RG-107-N

Doing policing : an inquiry into the rhetorical and argumentative skills of the police

This thesis examines the spoken and written discourse of uniformed British police officers. Utilising a rhetorical and discursive analysis, the study considers firstly how officers use their considerable powers of discretion to deal informally with crime and criminal incidents. Focusing on a form of discretion that the police refer to as cuffing, two specific discursive practices were identified as being used by police to informally resolve crime: these were the giving of suitable advice and the that's civil device. The second part of the study was concerned with the formal prosecution process and how officers construct prosecution case files. Specifically, how they reformulate and precis evidence in 'domestic' violence cases to assist a Crown prosecutor in making a charging decision. In this normally confidential and non-public discourse, officers rely upon a very narrow range of linguistic devices and speech genres; these are combined with an equally limited array of gendered stereotypes and legal myths, with the result that prosecution cases can be 'subverted' (Sacks 1995) and thus discontinued. In both studies, the doing of policing was consistent with two occupational ideologies that are influential within police operational subcultures: the ideology of pragmatism and the ideology of self-preservation. The findings raise concerns about some of the working practices of the police.Economic Science and Research Counci