July 17, 2018
"McCleskey V. Kemp: Field Notes from 1977-1991"
The title of this post is the title of this notable paper authored by John Charles Boger available now via SSRN. Here is its abstract:
This Essay is an expanded version of a keynote address to a Symposium hosted by the Northwestern University School of Law. It examines the handiwork of the Supreme Court in the McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) case and the adverse impact of McCleskey on the subsequent judicial consideration of statistical evidence -- even of widespread racial discrimination -- in the capital and criminal justice systems.
As one member of the legal team who brought the McCleskey case, my contribution was to speculate on how and why the Court might have disregarded such meticulously documented and unrebutted patterns of racial disparities in capital sentencing, despite the Justices’ formal condemnation of racial discrimination in principle and their occasional intervention to curb particularly egregious acts of racial injustice. This Essay ends by encouraging social scientists and legal scholars to continue to uncover and oppose patterns of racial discrimination that remain widespread in the administration of criminal justice.
July 17, 2018 at 01:01 AM | Permalink