Payne v. Tennessee: The Arbitrary Imposition of the Death Penalty and a Review of Florida Case Law Since: Booth v. Maryland

In Booth v. Maryland,1 the United States Supreme Court decided that evidence relating to a victim\u27s character and the extent of harm caused to the victim\u27s family and community was inadmissible to deter- mine whether a defendant convicted of a capital crime should be put to death. The majority in Booth, while empathizing with the grief of a victim\u27s family, recognized the potential danger such evidence has on a jury to sentence defendants to death based on such arbitrary factors as what kind of person the victim was and the unforeseeable harm the victim\u27s death had on others

Automatic Classification of Text Databases through Query Probing

Many text databases on the web are "hidden" behind search interfaces, and their documents are only accessible through querying. Search engines typically ignore the contents of such search-only databases. Recently, Yahoo-like directories have started to manually organize these databases into categories that users can browse to find these valuable resources. We propose a novel strategy to automate the classification of search-only text databases. Our technique starts by training a rule-based document classifier, and then uses the classifier's rules to generate probing queries. The queries are sent to the text databases, which are then classified based on the number of matches that they produce for each query. We report some initial exploratory experiments that show that our approach is promising to automatically characterize the contents of text databases accessible on the web.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur