Search

The US Supreme Court has set 2 key constitutionally based limits to punishment of juveniles; a bar on the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by juveniles and of life imprisonment without possibility of parole for juveniles who commit nonhomicide offenses. Both decisions held that these penalties were disproportionate given juveniles' distinctive characteristics. The Court's adoption of a developmental model of culpability may produce future challenges to lengthy juvenile sentences, broad provisions allowing transfer of juveniles for trial as adults, and even possibly to younger juveniles'competence to stand trial., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The Flynn Effect is a well-established psychometric fact documenting substantial increases in measured intelligence test performance over time. Flynn's (1984) review of the literature established that Americans gain approximately 0.3 points per year or 3 points per decade in measured intelligence. The accurate assessment and interpretation of intellectual functioning becomes critical in death penalty cases that seek to determine whether an individual meets the criteria for intellectual disability and thereby is ineligible for execution under Atkins v. Virginia (2002) . We reviewed the literature on the Flynn Effect and demonstrated how failure to adjust intelligence test scores based on this phenomenon invalidates test scores and may be in violation of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing as well as the "Ethical Principles for Psychologists and Code of Conduct." Application of the Flynn Effect and score adjustments for obsolete norms clearly is supported by science and should be implemented by practicing psychologists.

This article deals with a case that recently came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The issues involved whether attorneys provided effective assistance to a person convicted of murder when no mitigating evidence was presented (either strategically or by neglect) to the jury concerning the intellectual disabilities of their client during the death penalty phase of the trial. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the death penalty for intellectually disabled individuals (mentally retarded) constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In this case the attorneys made a strategic decision not to present possibly mitigating evidence for the death penalty phase. The Supreme Court considered whether the appeals court abdicated its judicial review responsibilities. The results of psychological evaluations are presented, and the decisions of the Supreme Court are discussed., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.)

Despite mixed empirical evidence regarding the ability of the Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (PCL-R) to predict violence among incarcerated inmates, it continues to be used to address such questions, even in the context of capital cases. The purpose of this study was to examine if the PCL-R has a prejudicial effect on mock jury members during the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial. Results indicated that participants were more likely to sentence the defendant to death when the defendant exhibited a high likelihood to commit future violence, whether or not the diagnostic label "psychopath" was present. Interestingly, when asked to rate the defendant's likelihood for future violence and murder, the defendant who was a high risk for future violence and not labeled a psychopath received the highest rating. These results suggest an absence of juror bias as it pertains to the label "psychopath" when sentencing a defendant in a capital murder case., (Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

There has been little consideration, in either the caselaw or the scholarly literature, of the potential impact of neuroimaging on cases assessing whether a seriously mentally disabled death row defendant is competent to be executed. The Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Panetti v. Quarterman significantly expanded its jurisprudence by ruling that such a defendant had a constitutional right to make a showing that his mental illness "obstruct[ed] a rational understanding of the State's reason for his execution." This article considers the impact of neuroimaging testimony on post-Panetti competency determination hearings, and looks at multiple questions of admissibility of evidence, adequacy of counsel, availability of expert assistance, juror attitudes, trial tactics, and application of the Daubert doctrine, and also considers the implications of the lesser-known Panetti holding (that enhances the role of expert witnesses in all competency-to-be-executed inquiries). It warns that the power of the testimony in question has the capacity to inappropriately affect fact-finders in ways that may lead "to outcomes that are both factually and legally inaccurate and constitutionally flawed.", (Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

Background: There are only a few anecdotal accounts describing physicians being punished for complicity with torture or crimes against humanity. A fuller list of such cases would address the perception that physicians may torture with impunity and point to how to improve their accountability for such crimes., Methods: We performed a multilingual web search of the records of international and national courts, military tribunals, medical associations (licensing boards and medical societies), medical and non-medical literature databases, human rights groups and media stories for reports of physicians who had been punished for complicity with torture or crimes against humanity that were committed after World War II., Results: We found 56 physicians in eight countries who had been punished for complicity with torture or crimes against humanity. Courts punish crimes. Medical societies punish ethics violations. Fifty-one physicians (85%) had been punished by the medical associations of five countries. Eleven (18%) had been punished by domestic courts. International courts had imprisoned two (3%) physicians. Several were punished by courts and professional associations. There are open cases against 22 physicians., Conclusions: Punishments against physicians for crimes against humanity are becoming institutionalized. Medical associations must lead in shouldering responsibility for self-regulation in this matter. Physicians have supervised torture ever since medieval "Torture Physicians" certified that prisoners were medically capable of withstanding the torture and of providing the desired testimony. Revelations of sadistic medical experiments on prisoners during World War II turned the world against physician torturers and led to the "Doctor's Trial" at Nuremberg, a trial that held physicians accountable for crimes against humanity. This paper describes the largest case series of physicians who have been punished for abetting torture or other crimes against humanity committed after World War II. We wanted to: 1) describe and categorize the hearing procedures, 2) identify the roles of punished physicians, 3) categorize acts for which physicians are punished, and 4) describe the political cultures in which punishments arise. Our larger aim was to learn whether punishments against physicians for abetting torture or crimes against humanity occur under sufficiently diverse environments as to inform generalizable public policy to punish and perhaps to deter this kind of medical misconduct.

A substantial body of research has explored the extent to which the race of offenders and victims influences who receives a death sentence for capital crimes. Little is known about how race and ethnicity might pattern death-row outcomes. Drawing upon evidence from male offenders sentenced to death in Texas during the years 1974 through 2009, we extend recent research by examining whether the race and ethnicity of offenders and victims and a number of offender, victim, and crime attributes influence the likelihood of executions and sentence relief (whereby prisoners leave death row). Cox regression analyses are used in conjunction with a multiple-imputation method for handling a modest amount of missing data. The results show that cases involving minorities—with black or Latino offenders or victims—have lower hazards of execution than cases in which both offenders and victims are white. Victim and offender race and ethnicity have little to no independent effect upon the hazard of sentence relief.

Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández was Mexico's most infamous serial killer. After he confessed to killing four young women and burying them behind his home, he became the darling of the crime pages and criminological experts alike, and his case provoked a lively debate over the reinstatement of the death penalty in congress. The following essay uses his story, the policy debates it provoked, and his broader institutional odyssey in La Castañeda mental asylum (1943–1947) and Lecumberri prison (1948–1976) to explore how issues that affected Mexicans across the social spectrum were discussed and settled in a political system that was neither a dictatorship nor a democracy.

The postconviction prison disciplinary records of capital defendants (n = 73) who had been the subject of defense-sponsored violence risk assessments or risk-related testimony (1995-2007) that asserted an improbability of future serious prison violence were analyzed. During postconviction prison tenures averaging 4.4 years, none of the capital defendants was cited for accomplished serious assaults. The prevalence of misconduct was inversely related to severity: 54.8 percent were cited for some disciplinary misconduct, 27.4 percent for potentially violent disciplinary violations, 12.3 percent for assaultive misconduct, and 1.4 percent for attempted serious assault. Rates of misconduct among the capital offenders were equivalent to those among all inmates (n = 18,561, annual average) in high-security federal prisons (2001-2005). The accuracy rate of forecasts of improbability stands in sharp contrast to that of prosecution-sponsored expert testimony at capital sentencing that had asserted high rates of future violence.

With our nation's present conflicts, a new generation of veterans are returning home, many of whom have substantial psychopathology and are encountering significant barriers in accessing care. Headlines from around the nation reflect that some of these wounded warriors go on to commit offenses that are potentially punishable by death. Existing circumstances speak to the urgency with which the subject of combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), or both facing capital crimes ought to be addressed. This publicity has led to a recent call for a legislatively or judicially enacted, narrow, categorical exclusion for combat veterans who were affected by either PTSD or TBI at the time of their capital offenses. In the present article, we illustrate the reality that combat veterans who commit capital offenses may face execution, summarize legal arguments offered in favor of a categorical exclusion, and provide a neuropsychiatric perspective on PTSD, TBI, and aggression, to help inform further dialogue on this weighty subject.

This study focused on whether and how deliberations affected the comprehension of capital penalty phase jury instructions and patterns of racially discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the race of victim (Black or White) were varied orthogonally. The participants provided their initial "straw" sentencing verdicts individually and then deliberated in simulated 4-7 person "juries." Results indicated that deliberation created a punitive rather than lenient shift in the jurors' death sentencing behavior, failed to improve characteristically poor instructional comprehension, did not reduce the tendency for jurors to misuse penalty phase evidence (especially, mitigation), and exacerbated the tendency among White mock jurors to sentence Black defendants to death more often than White defendants.

In Atkins v. Virginia the U.S. Supreme Court declared execution of persons with mental retardation to constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and thus to be unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. However, the Court left all considerations regarding how to implement the decision explicitly to the states. Since Atkins was decided in 2002, legislatures, courts, and mental health experts have struggled with its implementation, highlighting the complexities that can arise when the courts base legal rules on clinical findings. This column reviews the Atkins case and considers the challenges associated with a clinical determination that can have life-or-death consequences for capital defendants.

The American Psychological Association's (APA's) stance on the psychological maturity of adolescents has been criticized as inconsistent. In its Supreme Court amicus brief in Roper v. Simmons (2005), which abolished the juvenile death penalty, APA described adolescents as developmentally immature. In its amicus brief in Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990), however, which upheld adolescents' right to seek an abortion without parental involvement, APA argued that adolescents are as mature as adults. The authors present evidence that adolescents demonstrate adult levels of cognitive capability earlier than they evince emotional and social maturity. On the basis of this research, the authors argue that it is entirely reasonable to assert that adolescents possess the necessary skills to make an informed choice about terminating a pregnancy but are nevertheless less mature than adults in ways that mitigate criminal responsibility. The notion that a single line can be drawn between adolescence and adulthood for different purposes under the law is at odds with developmental science. Drawing age boundaries on the basis of developmental research cannot be done sensibly without a careful and nuanced consideration of the particular demands placed on the individual for "adult-like" maturity in different domains of functioning., (Copyright 2009 APA)

In Panetti v. Quarterman, three professional associations advocated commutation of capital sentences for offenders who are incompetent to face execution. Some judicial opinions deny that convicted offenders have any protected interest in avoiding a legally imposed sentence, and other opinions have found that the Eighth Amendment requires treatment for prisoners with serious mental health needs. This article examines some circumstances in which health care providers in the context of criminal punishment encounter apparent conflicts among the treatment interests of the individuals, the comprehensive interests of these individuals, legally protected interests, and the public interest. This analysis pursues clarification of these interests and of potential tensions among legal and professional obligations of health care providers. This article does not provide comprehensive resolution of this tension. Rather, it is intended to promote rigorous ongoing inquiry by clarifying the relevant interests at stake and the responsibilities of various participants in the complex interaction of health care and corrections., ((c) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

Capital punishment was the source of lively debate in Italy, from unification in 1861 until 1888. The precedent for abolishing the death penalty had been set in Tuscany in 1786. This paper presents the arguments put forward by two eminent psychiatrists who opposed the death penalty, Carlo Livi and Andrea Verga. Livi set out his scientific case for abolition in two addresses given to the Accademia dei Fisiocritici in Siena in 1862. In 1889 Verga wrote a commentary on the Senate sitting and argued in favour of approving the Italian Penal Code. Verga agreed with Livi's arguments and disagreed with the School of Criminal Anthropology, led by Cesare Lombroso and Raffaele Garofalo, who were both in favour of capital punishment.

Under Atkins v. Virginia, the Eighth Amendment exempts from execution individuals who meet the clinical definitions of mental retardation set forth by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and the American Psychiatric Association. Both define mental retardation as significantly subaverage intellectual functioning accompanied by significant limitations in adaptive functioning, originating before the age of 18. Since Atkins, most jurisdictions have adopted definitions of mental retardation that conform to those definitions. But some states, looking often to stereotypes of persons with mental retardation, apply exclusion criteria that deviate from and are more restrictive than the accepted scientific and clinical definitions. These state deviations have the effect of excluding from Atkins's reach some individuals who plainly fall within the class it protects. This article focuses on the cases of Roger Cherry, Jeffrey Williams, Michael Stallings, and others, who represent an ever-growing number of individuals inappropriately excluded from Atkins. Left unaddressed, the state deviations discussed herein permit what Atkins does not: the death-sentencing and execution of some capital defendants who have mental retardation.

More than 1.5 million Americans have participated in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past seven years. Some of these veterans have subsequently committed capital crimes and found themselves in our nation's criminal justice system. This Essay argues that combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury at the time of their offenses should not be subject to the death penalty.Offering mitigating evidence regarding military training, post-traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury presents one means that combat veterans may use to argue for their lives during the sentencing phase of their trials. Alternatively, Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons offer a framework for establishing a legislatively or judicially created categorical exclusion for these offenders, exempting them from the death penalty as a matter of law. By understanding how combat service and service-related injuries affect the personal culpability of these offenders, the legal system can avoid the consequences of sentencing to death America's mentally wounded warriors, ensuring that only the worst offenders are subject to the ultimate punishment.

Professor Landy Sparr's paper systematically examines issues and anomalies of courtroom practice in relation to offenders who are considered to have a personality disorder. The in-depth description of a recent case from the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia forms the basis of the paper. As an international forum, the Tribunal illustrates clearly the different practices and interpretations in various jurisdictions. Sparr provides much detail about the machinations of the Tribunal, leading to speculation about the principles that underlie the complex legislation as it is applied in different countries. Despite the considerable differences in mental health systems among different countries, there are probably shared themes and trends that influence the practice of forensic psychiatry.

Objective: This study aimed to compare the dilemmas of using organs from prisoners with death penalties (PDP) from the perspectives of organ transplant health professionals (OTHP) from Taiwan (TW) and Mainland China (MC)., Materials and Methods: A purposive sample including TW's OTHP (including transplant surgeons, nurses, researchers, social workers, and medical religious and legal experts), and MC's OTHP (including surgeons and nurses) was obtained in this qualitative research. TW's subjects received face-to-face interviews, and MC's subjects received telephone interviews due to limited communication opportunities. Data were analyzed by content analysis., Results: A total of 105 subjects participated in this project (TW n = 99, MC n = 6). They were surgeons (n = 18: TW n = 14, MC n = 4), registered nurses (n = 42: TW n = 40, MC n = 2), OT coordinating nurses (n = 10 TW), OT researchers (n = 5 TW), social workers (n = 10 TW), medical religious experts (n = 15 TW), and medical legal experts (n = 5 TW). The following 8 ethical dilemmas were reported: (1) questionable legitimacy of PDP motivation (TW 100%, MC 100%); (2) recipients' worries about public discrimination (TW 89%, MC 50%); (3) difficulties in approaching PDP (TW 100%); (4) hesitation of HP and volunteers in helping PDP (TW 37%); (5) questionable social contribution of PDP as donor sources (TW 32%); (6) complex legal details of PDP issues (TW 26%); (7) potential threat from PDP families (TW 23%); and (8) difficulties in helping PDP families cope with post-organ donation syndrome (TW 11%)., Conclusions: Five suggestions were developed in managing these challenges: (1) TW OTHP may empower their basic social science knowledge and empirical competence; (2) TW government may form a task force wherein OTHP leaders are encouraged to foster interdisciplinary collaborations with the public within short-, mid-, and long-term time frames; (3) TW and MC may establish evidence-based center(s) to provide systematic literature reviews for clinical guidance, policy making, and educational resources; (4) TW and MC may try to improve the quality of PDP organ harvesting and donation practice in jails/health institutes; and (5) TW and MC may develop reliable communication systems to share experiences of quality care for PDP, and to evaluate the appraisals both pro and con from multidisciplinary societies and the public, if available.

Lethal injection as a method of state-sanctioned capital punishment was initially proposed in the United States in 1977 and used for the first time in 1982. Most lethal injection protocols use a sequential drug combination of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. Lethal injection was originally introduced as a more humane form of execution compared with existing mechanical methods such as electrocution, toxic gassing, hanging, or firing squad. Lethal injection has not, however, been without controversy. Several states are considering whether lethal injection meets constitutional scrutiny forbidding cruel and unusual punishment. Recently in the case of Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling, Petitioners, v John D. Rees, Commissioner, Kentucky Department of Corrections et al, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the lethal injection protocol as carried out in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Most of the debate has surrounded the dosing and procedures used in lethal injection and whether the drug combinations and measures for administering the drugs truly produce a timely, pain-free, and fail-safe death. Many have also raised issues regarding the "medicalization" of execution and the ethics of health care professionals' participation in any part of the lethal injection process. As a result of all these issues, the future of lethal injection as a means of execution in the United States is under significant scrutiny. Outcomes of ongoing legislative and judicial reviews might result in cessation of lethal injection in totality or in alterations involving specific drug combinations or administration procedures.

The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that execution by a commonly used protocol of drug administration does not represent cruel or unusual punishment. Various medical journals have editorialized on this drug protocol, the death penalty in general and the role that physicians play. Many physicians, and societies of physicians, express the opinion that it is unethical for doctors to participate in executions. This Target Article explores the harm that occurs to murder victims' relatives when an execution is delayed or indefinitely postponed. By using established principles in psychiatry and the science of the brain, it is shown that victims' relatives can suffer brain damage when justice is not done. Conversely, adequate justice can reverse some of those changes in the brain. Thus, physician opposition to capital punishment may be contributing to significant harm. In this context, the ethics of physician involvement in lethal injection is complex.

The death penalty remains a contentious issue even though it has been abolished in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, European Union member nations and some Asian countries such as Cambodia, East Timor and Nepal. Many argue that the irrevocability of the death penalty, in the face of potential erroneous convictions, can never justify its imposition. The Philippines, the first Asian country that abolished the death penalty in 1987, held the record for the most number of mandatory death offenses (30 offenses) and death eligible offenses (22 offenses) after it was re-imposed in 1994. Majority of death penalty convictions were decided based on testimonial evidence. While such cases undergo automatic review by the Supreme Court, the appellate process in the Philippines is not structured to accept post-conviction evidence, including DNA evidence. Because of the compelling nature of post-conviction DNA evidence in overturning death penalty convictions in the United States, different groups advocated its use in the Philippines. In one such case, People v Reynaldo de Villa, the defendant was charged with raping his 13-year-old niece that supposedly led to birth of a female child, a situation commonly known as 'criminal paternity'. This paper reports the results of the first post-conviction DNA test using 16 Short Tandem Repeat (STR) DNA markers in a criminal paternity case (People v Reynaldo de Villa) and discusses the implications of these results in the Philippine criminal justice system.

On the basis of K. Stenner's (2005) authoritarian dynamic theory, it was hypothesized that the number of death sentences and executions would be higher in more threatened conservative states than in less threatened conservative states, and would be lower in more threatened liberal states than in less threatened liberal states. Threat was based on state homicide rate, violent crime rate, and non-White percentage of population. Conservatism was based on state voter ideological identification, Democratic and Republican Party elite liberalism-conservatism, policy liberalism-conservatism, religious fundamentalism, degree of economic freedom, and 2004 presidential election results. For 1977-2004, with controls for state population and years with a death penalty provision, the interactive hypothesis received consistent support using the state conservatism composite and voter ideological identification alone. As well, state conservatism was related to death penalties and executions, but state threat was not. The temporal stability of the findings was demonstrated with a split-half internal replication using the periods 1977-1990 and 1991-2004. The interactive hypothesis and the results also are discussed in the context of other threat-authoritarianism theories and terror management theory., ((c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Using one mock trial scenario, this study investigated whether religious and demographic factors were related to death penalty attitudes and sentencing verdicts. Those who favored the death penalty differed from those who had doubts about the penalty in gender, affiliation, fundamentalism, evangelism, literal Biblical interpretism, beliefs about God's attitudes toward murders, and perceptions of how their religious groups felt about the death penalty. These relationships generally held after mock jurors were death qualified. Gender, fundamentalism, literal interpretism, beliefs about God's death penalty position, and perceptions of how one's religious group felt about the death penalty predicted death penalty sentencing verdicts. Future research could determine whether using peremptory challenges to exclude potential jurors based on religion can help lawyers choose a more favorable jury.