A common criticism of six-person juries is that they reduce the representation of minority groups. That claim captures one consequence of smaller juries but overlooks another. Under random selection from the same jury pool, reducing jury size does not change a minority group’s average percentage of jury seats. It increases how much that percentage varies…
Few figures illustrate the future-dangerousness problem more clearly than Dr. James Grigson, the Texas psychiatrist known as “Doctor Death.” Grigson was notorious not simply because he testified for the prosecution, but because of what he told juries. He repeatedly claimed that defendants were incurable sociopaths and that there was a “one hundred percent and absolute”…
Marion Wilson’s life began in instability and violence long before it ended in a Georgia execution chamber. His case is often remembered for the crime that brought him to death row, but its legal significance lies elsewhere—in what the courts concluded could not be shown about his life, and what that failure ultimately cost him….
Florida has been on an execution spree—not of carrying out death sentences, but of handing them out. In recent years, the state has systematically expanded capital punishment, adding new eligible offenses including sexual abuse of children, mandating automatic death sentences for undocumented immigrants convicted of capital crimes, and reducing the jury threshold from unanimous to…
When people think about post-conviction litigation in criminal cases, they often think of claims of actual innocence — efforts to prove that someone who was wrongfully convicted did not commit the crime at all. But a different and equally important type of claim focuses not on innocence, but on fairness — whether the defendant received…