Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2006 Less is Better: Justice Stevens and the Narrowed Death Penalty James S. Liebman Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Lawrence C. Marshall Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Supreme Court of the United States Commons Recommended Citation James S. Liebman & Lawrence C. Marshall, Less is Better: Justice Stevens and the Narrowed Death Penalty, 74 FORDHAM L. REV. 1607 (2006). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/470 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. LESS IS BETTER: JUSTICE STEVENS AND THE NARROWED DEATH PENALTY James S. Liebman and Lawrence C. Marshall* INTRODUCTION: JUSTICE STEVENS ON THE DEATH PENALTY In a recent speech to the American Bar Association, Justice John Paul Stevens "issued an unusually stinging criticism of capital punishment."1 Although he "stopped short of calling for an end to the death penalty," Justice Stevens catalogued a number of its "'serious flaws,' '2 including several procedures that the full Court has reviewed and upheld over his dissent-selecting capital jurors in a manner that excludes those with qualms about the death penalty, permitting elected state judges to second- guess jurors when they decline to impose the death penalty, permitting states to premise death verdicts on "victim impact statements," tolerating sub-par legal representation of capital defendants, and eschewing steps that might moderate the risk of executing the innocent.3 News reports on the * Professor Liebman was a Law Clerk for Justice Stevens in the October 1978 Term.