About This Course
Controversial, yet present in virtually every state's criminal code since the founding of the United States almost 250 years ago, the issue of Capital Punishment has been consistently controversial.concern if over whether the penalty itself is fair, whether it is fairly administrated in both conception, and action and over the last 70 years the controversy has concentrated on three primary concerns about the death penalty:
- Whether having both the letter and imposition of the ultimate punishment can ever be administered consistent with fair and procedurely constitutional prosecures (regardless of personal belief).
- Whether having a death penalty is in and of itself inherently unfair?
- Whether individual states, and within then,, individual judicial circuits are administering capital justice fairly?
Most recently whether the demographics of capital punishment render invidious racial injustice so unfair, that no matter what safeguards there is no such thing as a "fair death penalty?" (Examining not only the demographics of death - by victim, killer, defendant, and condemned).
Finally a discussion rarely attempted, whether the FAILURE to provide a death penalty in fact devalues certain lives of murder victims, disproportionately those who are Black, woman and poor creates a situation where invidious race-based discrimination is GRANTING life to those killers whose every other demographic argues for their execution.
To paraphrase Law Professor Cass Sunstein:
Imagine a world where the rights of anyone can be wiped at on a moment's notice. Where the decision to impose death is entirely arbitrary, and there is no practical appeal, and no mercy. You have entered the land of homicide!
