Vanderbilt Law Review Volume 33 Issue 1 Issue 1 - January 1980 Article 2 1-1980 Execution Without Trial: Police Homicide and the Constitution Lawrence W. Sherman Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr Part of the Criminal Law Commons, and the Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons Recommended Citation Lawrence W. Sherman, Execution Without Trial: Police Homicide and the Constitution, 33 Vanderbilt Law Review 71 (1980) Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol33/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Vanderbilt Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Vanderbilt Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarship@Vanderbilt Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Execution Without Trial: Police Homicide and the Constitution* Lawrence W. Sherman** The national debate over the State's right to take life has been sidetracked, in a sense, on the issue of "capital punishment," or more precisely, execution after trial. Far more deadly in impact is the body of law permitting execution without trial through justified homicide by police officers. In 1976, for example, no one was exe- cuted and 233 persons were sentenced to death after trial, yet an estimated 590 persons were killed by police officers justifiably with- out trial.I Even in the 1950s, when an average of seventy-two persons were executed after trial each year,2 the average number of police homicides was 240 a year, according to official statistics, 3 and 480 a year according to one unofficial estimate.4 Since record keeping began in 1949, police actions have been by far the most frequent method with which our government has intentionally taken the lives of its own citizens.