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Is the "culture of death" slowly dying at the Supreme Court?

By Douglas A. Berman

As regular readers know, I have long complained about Supreme Court being caught up in what I called a ?culture of death?: a tendency of the Court to devote, in my view, far too much of its scarce judicial time and energy to reviewing death penalty cases and adjudicating the claims of death row defendants.  I synthesized these complaints in an article published last year in Ohio Northern University Law Review based (on a lecture I gave at ONU) titled, "A Capital Waste of Time? Examining the Supreme Court's 'Culture of Death'," which is available at this link. In a coda to that piece, I noted that the Court had recently reduced the number of capital case cert grants, and I speculated that recent changes in personnel might be moving the Court away from its troublesome affinity for obsessing over capital cases...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 30, 2009 (boomark / email).