Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Harvard Law Review
Volume
130
Publication Date
2016
Keywords
death penalty; federal regulation; capital punishment; abolition; race; criminal justice
Abstract
This Review of Courting Death offers a different take on two of Professor Carol Steiker and Professor Jordan Steiker's major themes: (1) the tension between effecting meaningful reform and legitimatizing legal façades, and (2) the future of the American death penalty. The Review argues several points, one being that the Model Penal Code may have had a larger pre-Furman impact than the Steikers acknowledge. In addition, the Review expands on some key contributors to the death penalty’s decline that may have been obscured by the all-encompassing nature of the Steikers’ regulation argument — for example, the emergence of unforeseeable exogenous variables (similar to the introduction of DNA evidence into criminal trials in the 1980s), as well as pressure points that exist largely outside of the constitutional regulatory framework, such as lethal injection litigation. Despite these influences, the Review finds the Steikers’ prediction — that, when abolition seems right, it will come by way of a “Furman II” Supreme Court decision — to readily comport with the death penalty’s trajectory over the last fifty years.
Recommended Citation
Deborah W. Denno,
Courting Abolition, 130 Harv. L. Rev. 1827
(2016-2017)
Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship/857
