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Date: November 25, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:25 pm
Time: 8:25 pm
Results for cruel and unusual punishment
5 results foundAuthor: Wesson, Marianne Title: Living Death: Ambivalence, Delay, and Capital Punishment Summary: Most discussions about capital punishment in the United States treat the distinct phenomena of death sentencing and execution as joined: in the ordinary case, it is assumed, the first will lead eventually to the second. But in fact it is exceptional for a death sentence to cause the death of the individual sentenced. During the entire modern death penalty era, since 1976, the ratio of death sentences pronounced in the U.S. to those carried out has been about six to one. This Article seeks to investigate the causes of the disparity. It surmises that our tolerance for it grows out of political and institutional ambivalence about capital punishment, and undertakes to identify which actors and processes enact this ambivalence and thus hinder the conversion of death sentences into executions. My research assistants and I chose a small number of jurisdictions that we found representative in which to study the post-sentence careers of death row inmates. We considered the roles of death while in prison, executive clemency, and federal habeas corpus intervention in creating attrition from death row, but taken together these events failed to account for all (indeed, even very much) of the disparity. We investigated in more detail the frequency of sentence reversal by postconviction appeal or collateral state remedies, but contrary to expectation, we found that these processes could not account for the disparity we had observed. We then undertook a more granular study, following the careers of a cohort of death row inmates, all of whom resided on death row in 1995 (and nearly half of whom still reside there today). Our findings suggest that the most powerful explanation was simply delay. Our study population consists entirely of prisoners who have been under sentence of death for seventeen years or longer, yet more of them (in some of our jurisdictions many more) are still alive and under sentence of death than have been executed. To be sure, necessary and expected legal processes consumed some of the intervening years, and the Article investigates and discusses the developments in capital punishment law that have contributed to impeding the march of execution. A variety of measures have been designed to hasten the processing of capital cases between sentence and execution, but they have been unsuccessful. Since 1976, the typical interval between sentence and execution has grown markedly over time, cannot really be explained by necessity, and begins to resemble a permanent feature of the system of capital punishment. Although predicting the outcome of individual cases is difficult, it appears that many death sentences that have not been carried out will never be carried out, and that we have accommodated ourselves to this reality. In closing, the Article discusses the implications of these observations for our national conversation about capital punishment, considers the recent landscape of explicit death penalty abolition activity (especially in California), and makes some predictions about the future of capital punishment. Details: Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Law Schoo, 2013. 60p. Source: Internet Resource: U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 13-4: Accessed March 7, 2013 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2221597 Year: 2013 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2221597 Shelf Number: 127861 Keywords: Capital PunishmentCruel and Unusual PunishmentDeath PenaltyHabeas Corpus |
Author: Mendez, Juan E. Title: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Summary: The present report focuses on certain forms of abuses in health-care settings that may cross a threshold of mistreatment that is tantamount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. It identifies the policies that promote these practices and existing protection gaps. By illustrating some of these abusive practices in health-care settings, the report sheds light on often undetected forms of abusive practices that occur under the auspices of health-care policies, and emphasizes how certain treatments run afoul of the prohibition on torture and ill-treatment. It identifies the scope of State‟s obligations to regulate, control and supervise health-care practices with a view to preventing mistreatment under any pretext. The Special Rapporteur examines a number of the abusive practices commonly reported in health-care settings and describes how the torture and ill-treatment framework applies in this context. The examples of torture and ill-treatment in health settings discussed likely represent a small fraction of this global problem. Details: Vienna: United Nations Human Rights Council, 2013. 23p. Source: Internet Resource: A/HRC/22/53: Accessed March 18, 2013 at: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session22/A.HRC.22.53_English.pdf Year: 2013 Country: International URL: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session22/A.HRC.22.53_English.pdf Shelf Number: 128000 Keywords: Cruel and Unusual PunishmentHealth-Care SettingsPunishmentTorture |
Author: Stinneford, John F. Title: Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments Summary: When the government wants to impose exceptionally harsh punishment on a criminal defendant, one of the ways it accomplishes this goal is to divide the defendant's single course of conduct into multiple offenses that give rise to multiple punishments. The Supreme Court has rendered the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, and the rule of lenity incapable of handling this problem by emptying them of substantive content and transforming them into mere instruments for effectuation of legislative will. This Article demonstrates that all three doctrines originally reflected a substantive legal preference for life and liberty, and a systemic bias against over-punishment. A punishment was deemed excessive under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause if it was greater than an offender's retributive desert, as measured against longstanding punishment practice. Prior to the twentieth century, if prosecutors proposed a novel unit of prosecution for a given crime, judges asked two questions: (1) Does this unit of prosecution give the government the opportunity to bring multiple charges based on a single course of conduct?; and (2) If so, would the bringing of multiple charges create an arbitrary relationship between the offender's culpability and his cumulative punishment, measured in light of prior punishment practice? If the answer to both questions was yes, judges would declare the punishment invalid under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, the Double Jeopardy Clause, or the rule of strict construction of penal statutes (the forerunner to today's rule of lenity). By recovering this methodology for addressing prosecutorial efforts to divide crime and multiply punishments, we can ameliorate our current mass incarceration crisis and make the American criminal justice system more just. Details: University of Florida Levin College of Law, 2014. 82p. Source: Internet Resource: University of Florida Levin College of Law Research Paper No. 15-7: Accessed September 5, 2015 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2526268 Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2526268 Shelf Number: 136688 Keywords: Cruel and Unusual PunishmentDouble JeopardyPunishment |
Author: Rovner, Laura Title: Dignity and the Eighth Amendment: A New Approach to Challenging Solitary Confinement Summary: The use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails has come under increasing scrutiny. Over the past few months, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy all but invited constitutional challenges to the use of solitary confinement, while President Obama asked, "Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day for months, sometime for years at a time?" Even some of the most notorious prisons and jails, including California's Pelican Bay State Prison and New York's Rikers Island, are reforming their use of solitary confinement because of successful litigation and public outcry. Rovner suggests that in light of these developments and "the Supreme Court's increasing reliance on human dignity as a substantive value underlying and animating constitutional rights," there is a strong case to make that long-term solitary confinement violates the constitutional right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Details: Washington, DC: American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, 2015. 20p. Source: Internet Resource: Issue Brief: Accessed May 6, 2016 at: Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: Shelf Number: 138961 Keywords: Conditions of ConfinementCruel and Unusual PunishmentInmatesMental HealthPunishmentSolitary Confinement |
Author: Equality and Human Rights Commission (U.K.) Title: Torture in the UK: update report. Submission to the UN Committee Against Torture in response to the UK List of Issues Summary: This report is the response of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to some of the issues raised by the Committee against Torture (the Committee) in its list of issues for the UK published on 7 June 2016. This report focuses on relevant developments or evidence that has emerged on the issues we covered in our previous report to the Committee in March 2016. The Committee included all of the issues highlighted in our 2016 submission in its list of issues for the UK's examination. This report also covers a number of additional areas in the Committee's list of issues, which we did not report on in 2016 but where we consider that aspects of the legal framework, policy or practice may be non-compliant with the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). The report contains 14 chapters, focusing on separate policy issues and settings where torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment may occur. At the start of each chapter we set out the relevant CAT Articles, the Committee's concluding observations and the relevant paragraphs in the Committee's list of issues. A stand-alone list of the recommendations contained within each chapter is also presented as an annex to the report. The Committee has made it clear that a state is responsible under CAT for the prohibited acts committed by non-state actors where the state has failed to develop an effective framework to prevent and protect the victims. The report therefore includes chapters on human trafficking and modern slavery, violence against women and girls, child sexual abuse and hate crime, where the state has responsibility to prevent and protect people from torture or ill-treatment by public and private actors. An important, cross-cutting area of concern runs through several chapters of the report, namely, the state's obligation to conduct a prompt and impartial investigation wherever there are grounds to believe that an act of torture has been committed (Article 12, CAT). Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which the UK has incorporated in the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), also require state parties to carry out an effective investigation into any death for which the state might be responsible and into any incident where there are clear indications that serious ill-treatment may have occurred. Case law makes it clear that the duty to conduct an effective investigation requires the state, among other things, to: - appoint an investigator independent of those implicated in the incident - begin the investigation promptly and conclude as quickly as is reasonable - take all reasonable steps to secure relevant evidence - make the investigation and its results open to public scrutiny - hold to account anyone found to be at fault as a result of the investigation, and - share and put into practice lessons learned from the investigation to ensure, so far as is possible, that steps are then taken to minimise the risk of similar incidents in the future. This report highlights our concerns about possible non-compliance with one or more of these requirements in the UK Government's response to allegations of torture and/or ill-treatment of: - overseas detainees - people held in immigration removal centres - children and adults in prisons and police custody - people receiving health and social care services, and - victims of violence against women and girls, human trafficking and modern slavery, hate crime and child sexual abuse. Details: Manchester, UK: Author, 2019. 90p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 5, 2019 at: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/convention-against-torture-in-the-uk-update-report-may-2019.pdf Year: 2019 Country: United Kingdom URL: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/convention-against-torture-in-the-uk-update-report-may-2019.pdf Shelf Number: 156846 Keywords: Cruel and Unusual PunishmentHuman Rights Abuses Punishment Torture |