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According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the top three factors determining whether a convict gets a death sentence in a murder case are not aggravating factors, but instead the location the crime occurred (and thus whether it is in the jurisdiction of a prosecutor aggressively using the death penalty), the quality of legal defense ...
Death penalty opponents regard the death penalty as inhumane [206] and criticize it for its irreversibility. [207] They argue also that capital punishment lacks deterrent effect, [ 208 ] [ 209 ] [ 210 ] or has a brutalization effect, [ 211 ] [ 212 ] discriminates against minorities and the poor, and that it encourages a "culture of violence ...
Harris, 465 U.S. 37 (1984) — A state appellate court, before it affirms a death sentence, is not required to compare the sentence in the case before it with the penalties imposed in similar cases if requested to do so by the prisoner. Whitmore v. Arkansas, 495 U.S. 149 (1990) — Mandatory appellate review is not required in death penalty cases.
The Marshall Project reports on the evolving perception and status of the right for death penalty defendants to present mitigating evidence that could sway a jury.
Yet when I covered a death penalty case of a young man accused of killing a beloved area restaurant owner, execution wasn’t a slam dunk for me. Seated directly behind the defendant, I could see ...
President Barack Obama confirmed speculation that he may be close to opposing the death penalty in federal cases.
In the late 1980s, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, from New York State, sponsored a bill to make certain federal drug crimes eligible for the death penalty as he was frustrated by the lack of a death penalty in his home state. [9] The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 restored the death penalty under federal law for drug offenses and some types of murder. [10]
Most jurisdictions in the United States of America maintain the felony murder rule. [1] In essence, the felony murder rule states that when an offender kills (regardless of intent to kill) in the commission of a dangerous or enumerated crime (called a felony in some jurisdictions), the offender, and also the offender's accomplices or co-conspirators, may be found guilty of murder.