The University of Texas at Austin

Current Capital Punishment Legal Literature

About the “Current Capital Punishment Legal Literature” website:

The "Current Capital Punishment Legal Literature" website is a resource for keeping informed about current articles related to capital punishment law.

The Law Library staff selects capital punishment articles daily from the U.S. legal journals and non-U.S. legal journals published in English. We then input into this database the basic bibliographic informationand an image of the first page of each article. The image of the article's first page will provide readers with a more complete idea of the scope of each article and the biographical background of the authors. Articles will be added two to three times a week, depending on the volume of cites.

This page is RSS-enabled. Subscribe to the RSS feed using a feed reader, or RSS-enabled browser (Firefox, Safari, or IE 7) to receive automatic notices of updates. The RSS feed address is http://tarlton.webhost.utexas.edu/punishment/rss.cfm.

The Library provides this service under the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law. Only the first page of an article will be scanned, and images will be deleted after 60 days. This service is for non-commercial, educational purposes only.

If you have any questions or comments about this service please contact Jane O'Connell, Director of faculty and student services.

Click article title to view a .pdf file of its first page.
Articles are listed in reverse chronological order:
January 20, 2010

Author: Stephen Vasciannie
Title: The Decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the Lambert Watson Case from Jamaica on the Mandatory Death Penalty and the Question of Fragmentation
Citation: 41 N.Y.U. J. Int'l L. & Pol. 837 (2009)

January 19, 2010

Author: Mark D. Cunningham, Jon R. Sorensen, and Thomas J. Reidy
Title: Capital Jury Decision-Making: The Limitations of Predictions of Future Violence
Citation: 15 Psychol. Pub. Pol'y & L. 223 (2009)

Author: Dominic Rupprecht
Title: Compelling Choice: Forcibly Medicating Death Row Inmates to Determine Whether They Wish to Pursue Collateral Relief
Citation: 114 Penn St. L. Rev. 333 (2009)

December 15, 2009

Author: COMMENT
Title: COMMENT, Reconciling the South Carolina Death Penalty Statute with the Sixth Amendment
Citation: 60 South Carolina Law Review 1031 (2009)

Author: Sara Colon
Title: Capital Crime: How California's Administration of the Death Penalty Violates the Eighth Amendment
Citation: 97 California Law Review 1377 (2009)

November 24, 2009

Author: Maura Caffrey
Title: Untying the Knot: A Solution for Confusion in Federal Habeas Review of Pennsylvania State Court Capital Convictions
Citation: 11 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 985

November 6, 2009

Author: Mark Mills
Title: Note, Cruel and Unusual: State v. Mata, the Electric Chair, and the Nebraska Supreme Court's Rejection of a Subjective Intent Requirement in Death Penalty Jurisprudence
Citation: 88 Neb. L. Rev. 235 (2009)

October 6, 2009

Author: Christopher Letkewicz
Title: Stacking the Deck in Favor of Death: The Illinois Supreme Court's Misinterpretation of Morgan v. Illinois
Citation: 2 DePaul J. Soc. Justice 217 (Spring 2009)

September 18, 2009

Author: Ian Loveland
Title: How do I kill thee? Let me count the ways: Lethal injection as a means of excecution in the United States
Citation: [2009] Public Law 453 (July 2009)

September 15, 2009

Author: Meghan Shapiro
Title: How "Future Dangerousness" Catches the Least Culpable Capital Defendants and Undermines the Rationale for the Executions It Supports
Citation: 35 American Journal of Criminal Law 145 (Spring 2008)

August 31, 2009

Author: Laura Hils
Title: NOTE, Challenges to Lethal Injection After Baze v. Rees: Emmett v. Johnson
Citation: 77 University of Cincinnati Law Review 1627 (2009)

Author: John P. Cawley, M.D.
Title: NOTE, Kentucky's Lethal Injection Protocol Satisfies the Eighth Amendment's Prohibition Against Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Baze v. Rees
Citation: 47 Duquesne Law Review 413 (2009)

Author: Dwight Aarons
Title: Adjudicating Claims of Innocence for the Capitally Condemned in Tennessee: Embracing a Truth Forum
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 511 (2009)

Author: David C. Baldus et al.
Title: Evidence of Racial Discrimination in the Use of the Death Penalty: A Story from Southwest Arkansas (1990-2005) with Special Reference to the Case of Death Row Inmate Frank Williams, Jr.
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 555 (2009)

Author: Hugo Adam Bedau
Title: Racism, Wrongful Convictions, and the Death Penalty
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 615 (2009)

Author: John H. Blume et al.
Title: An Empirical Look at Atkins v. Virginia and its Application in Capital Cases
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 627 (2009)

Author: Lyn Suzanne Entzeroth
Title: The Illusion of Sanity: The Constitutional and Moral Danger of Medicating Condemned Prisoners in Order to Execute Them
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 641 (2009)

Author: Bradley A. MacLean
Title: Effective Capital Defense Representation and the Difficult Client
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 661 (2009)

Author: Judge Gilbert Stroud Merritt, Jr.
Title: Prosecutorial Error in Death Penalty Cases
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 677 (2009)

Author: Penny J. White
Title: Treated Differently in Life But Not in Death: The Execution of the Intellectually Disabled after Atkins v. Virginia
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 685 (2009)

Author: Pamela A. Wilkins
Title: Competency for Execution: The Implications of a Communicative Model of Retribution
Citation: 76 Tennessee Law Review 713 (2009)

August 17, 2009

Author: Michael Mello
Title: What Came Before We Killed Him: Deconstructing Execution Number 58
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 849 (2009)

Author: Michael N. Burt
Title: The Importance of Storytelling at All Stages of a Capital Case
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 877 (2009)

Author: Craig Haney
Title: On Mitigation as Counter-Narrative: A Case Study of the Hidden Context of Prison Violence
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 911 (2009)

Author: Russell Stetler
Title: The Unknown Story of a Motherless Child
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 947 (2009)

Author: John H. Blume and Sheri Lynn Johnson
Title: Back to a Future: Reversing Keith Simpson's Death Sentence and Making Peace with the Victim's Family Through Post-Conviction Investigation
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 963 (2009)

Author: Mark E. Olive
Title: Narrative Works
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 989 (2009)

Author: Sean D. O'Brien
Title: Mothers and Sons: The Lloyd Schlup Story
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 1021 (2009)

Author: Brittany A. Boswell
Title: COMMENT, True Terror: Life after Guantanamo
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 1093 (2009)

Author: Melody Dickson
Title: COMMENT, Dismantling the Free Will Fairytale: The Importance of Demonstrating the Inability to Overcome in Death Penalty Narratives
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 1123 (2009)

Author: Kate Paulman
Title: COMMENT, Bringing Life to Legal Writing: How to Use Literary Journalism in Capital Litigation
Citation: 77 UMKC Law Review 1147 (2009)

August 11, 2009

Author: Justin D. Levinson
Title: Race, Death, and the Complicitous Mind
Citation: 58 DePaul Law Review 599 (2009)

Author: Michael K. Brown
Title: The Death Penalty and the Politics of Racial Resentment in the Post Civil Rights Era
Citation: 58 DePaul Law Review 645 (2009)

Author: Albert W. Alschuler
Title: Plea Bargaining and the Death Penalty
Citation: 58 DePaul Law Review 671 (2009)

Author: Andrea D. Lyon
Title: Mixed Media: Popular Culture and Race and their Effect on Jury Selection
Citation: 58 DePaul Law Review 681 (2009)

Author: Craig Haney
Title: Media Criminology and the Death Penalty
Citation: 58 DePaul Law Review 689 (2009)

Author: Rachel Lyon
Title: Media, Race, Crime, and Punishment: Re-Framing Stereotypes in Crime and Human Rights Issues
Citation: 58 DePaul Law Review 741 (2009)

August 10, 2009

Author: Bruce J. Winick
Title: The Supreme Court's Evolving Death Penalty Jurisprudence: Severe Mental Illness as the Next Frontier
Citation: 50 Boston College Law Review 785 (2009)