Judicial override is a concept that has been in place since the late 1970s. It’s a permissive doctrine that gives state trial judges the option to override a jury’s sentencing determination and institute a sentence the judge believes is more suitable. In Alabama, judicial override has been used frequently to override jury verdicts of life without parole for the death penalty. The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to grant certiorari on the question of whether Alabama’s use of the judicial override option violates a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury as well as the Eighth Amendment’s prohibitions on arbitrary and capricious death sentences and cruel and unusual punishment.

SCOTUS Watch: Glossip v. Gross

SCOTUS Watch

Glossip v. Gross, Docket No. 14-7955,

on Appeal from the Tenth Circuit

Introduction

“From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.  For more than twenty years I have endeavored—indeed.  I have struggled—along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor.  Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation is eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.”

-          Justice Harry Blackmun

In the current term of the United States Supreme Court, the Justices are set to decide a case which almost literally questions the “machinery of death” and the “death penalty experiment.”   

The Death Penalty: Academia v. Public Opinion

In the past decade or so, the subject of capital punishment has spurred many academics to heated opinions arguing for and against the death penalty.  Some opponents of capital punishment have highlighted the world trend of abolishing the death penalty, noting that China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States carry out most of the known executions around the world, and that “the number of countries that still allow the death penalty has been dwindling.” 

Recent Issues in Using Midzolam in Executions

In late July, the United States Supreme Court lifted a stay issued by the Ninth Circuit that required the State of Arizona to provide information about its lethal injection drug cocktail to inmate Joseph Rudolph Wood.  Mr. Wood was executed that same day.  His death was characterized by reporters as taking more than two hours and he took more than 600 gasps for air.  Most executions are complete in ten or eleven minutes.  Mr. Wood’s lengthy execution comes on the heels of another lengthy execution where Mr. Dennis McGuire took more than 20 minutes to die in Ohio, and also repeatedly convulsed and fought for breath after being injected.  An inmate in Oklahoma took more than a half an hour to die in his execution.

Scaling the Courthouse Steps: Recent Challenges to the Oklahoma State Capital Punishment Secrecy Laws

This article's purpose is to briefly highlight for practitioners some of the news about Oklahoma's ongoing capital punishment dispute and the potential ramifications it could have on capital punishment practitioners. 

On April 21, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a stay of execution order for death row inmates, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, in the wake of a constitutional challenge to Oklahoma’s state law preventing inmates from learning the source of the drugs used to kill them.