News and Developments: Law Reviews

Professor Bruce Winick of the Miami School of Law has written an article arguing that the Supreme Court should extend the protection it presently offers to those with mental retardation and juveniles to offenders with severe mental illness, as well. In The Supreme Court’s Emerging Death Penalty Jurisprudence: Severe Mental Illness as the Next Frontier, Winick reviews the High Court’s analysis of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment with a focus on when the Court has found the death penalty disproportionate to the crime or for the offender. While Winick argues that the Supreme Court is not prepared to render the death penalty itself as cruel and unusual, he concludes that, “At least some (although by no means all) offenders suffering from severe mental illness, like those with mental retardation and juveniles, will have sufficiently diminished culpability and deterability at the time of the offense to render capital punishment a disproportionate penalty under the Eighth Amendment.”

The Fordham Urban Law Journal has published a series of articles based on a symposium on lethal injection that was held at Fordham Law School in March 2008.  The issue includes articles by Professor Deborah Denno of Fordham, a leading historian and expert on methods of execution, Judge Jeremy Fogel, a federal judge overseeing the challenge to lethal injection in California, Judge Fernando Gaitan, a federal judge who oversaw the challenge to Missouri's lethal injection process, and articles by doctors and other experts who spoke at the symposium.

A recent law review article argues that capital defendants' right to expert assistance would grow stronger through the revitalization of the 1983 Supreme Court decision in Ake v.