Knockin\u27 on Heaven\u27s Door: Rethinking the Role of Religion in Death Penalty Cases

Religion has played a prominent role at various points of capital trials. In jury selection, peremptory challenges have been exercised against prospective jurors on the basis of their religion. At the sentencing phase, defendants have offered as mitigating evidence proof of their religiosity, and the prosecution has introduced evidence of the victim\u27s religiosity. In closing argument, quotations from the Bible and other appeals to religion have long been common. During deliberations, jurors have engaged in group prayer and tried to sway one another with quotes from scripture. Such practices have not gone unquestioned. Rather remarkably, however, the questions have almost always been framed and answered with little or no attention to the two clauses of the federal Constitution that speak directly and broadly to issues of religion: the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. This article seeks to give those clauses their due. The article is divided into four parts, each addressing the role that religion has played at a certain stage of the proceedings. In each part, we begin with a brief description of the way in which courts generally have analyzed the validity of particular uses of religion, and we then turn to the validity of those uses from the perspective of the Religion Clauses. At times, careful consideration of the Religion Clauses only confirms the correctness of conclusions that the courts have reached by other routes. In various instances, however, it calls for important changes in the way in which capital trials are run

Knockin\u27 on Heaven\u27s Door: Rethinking the Role of Religion in Death Penalty Cases

Religion has played a prominent role at various points of capital trials. In jury selection, peremptory challenges have been exercised against prospective jurors on the basis of their religion. At the sentencing phase, defendants have offered as mitigating evidence proof of their religiosity, and the prosecution has introduced evidence of the victim\u27s religiosity. In closing argument, quotations from the Bible and other appeals to religion have long been common. During deliberations, jurors have engaged in group prayer and tried to sway one another with quotes from scripture. Such practices have not gone unquestioned. Rather remarkably, however, the questions have almost always been framed and answered with little or no attention to the two clauses of the federal Constitution that speak directly and broadly to issues of religion: the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. This article seeks to give those clauses their due. The article is divided into four parts, each addressing the role that religion has played at a certain stage of the proceedings. In each part, we begin with a brief description of the way in which courts generally have analyzed the validity of particular uses of religion, and we then turn to the validity of those uses from the perspective of the Religion Clauses. At times, careful consideration of the Religion Clauses only confirms the correctness of conclusions that the courts have reached by other routes. In various instances, however, it calls for important changes in the way in which capital trials are run

A homological interpretation of the transverse quiver Grassmannians

In recent articles, the investigation of atomic bases in cluster algebras associated to affine quivers led the second-named author to introduce a variety called transverse quiver Grassmannian and the first-named and third-named authors to consider the smooth loci of quiver Grassmannians. In this paper, we prove that, for any affine quiver Q, the transverse quiver Grassmannian of an indecomposable representation M is the set of points N in the quiver Grassmannian of M such that Ext^1(N,M/N)=0. As a corollary we prove that the transverse quiver Grassmannian coincides with the smooth locus of the irreducible components of minimal dimension in the quiver Grassmannian.Comment: final version, 7 pages, corollary 1.2 has been modifie

4D STEM: high efficiency phase contrast imaging using a fast pixelated detector

Phase contrast imaging is widely used for imaging beam sensitive and weak phase objects in electron microscopy. In this work we demonstrate the achievement of high efficient phase contrast imaging in STEM using the pnCCD, a fast direct electron pixelated detector, which records the diffraction patterns at every probe position with a speed of 1000 to 4000 frames per second, forming a 4D STEM dataset simultaneously with the incoherent Z-contrast imaging. Ptychographic phase reconstruction has been applied and the obtained complex transmission function reveals the phase of the specimen. The results using GaN and Ti, Nd- doped BiFeO3 show that this imaging mode is especially powerful for imaging light elements in the presence of much heavier elements

Rupture of multiple parallel molecular bonds under dynamic loading

Biological adhesion often involves several pairs of specific receptor-ligand molecules. Using rate equations, we study theoretically the rupture of such multiple parallel bonds under dynamic loading assisted by thermal activation. For a simple generic type of cooperativity, both the rupture time and force exhibit several different scaling regimes. The dependence of the rupture force on the number of bonds is predicted to be either linear, like a square root or logarithmic.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Effects of disorder in location and size of fence barriers on molecular motion in cell membranes

The effect of disorder in the energetic heights and in the physical locations of fence barriers encountered by transmembrane molecules such as proteins and lipids in their motion in cell membranes is studied theoretically. The investigation takes as its starting point a recent analysis of a periodic system with constant distances between barriers and constant values of barrier heights, and employs effective medium theory to treat the disorder. The calculations make possible, in principle, the extraction of confinement parameters such as mean compartment sizes and mean intercompartmental transition rates from experimentally reported published observations. The analysis should be helpful both as an unusual application of effective medium theory and as an investigation of observed molecular movements in cell membranes.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure