Word: meltsner
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...thing, however, is certain: public opinion strongly favors the death penalty. For the moment, anyway. But, according to Columbia Law Professor Michael Meltsner, the history of capital punishment demonstrates that "when the death penalty is used frequently, it provokes resistance...
...cruel and unusual punishment, virtually every legal handicapper was stunned. But during the previous nine years, a small and exceptionally talented group of lawyers had worked quietly toward just such a result with painstaking premeditation. Cruel and Unusual, written by one of the lawyers, Michael Meltsner, and published this week by Random House ($8.95), tells how they did it. The details of the battle make for a sometimes rousing intellectual adventure story...
Though the resulting study by University of Pennsylvania Sociologist Marvin Wolfgang impressively documented discrimination, no court would buy the argument that general statistics proved unconstitutional bias in a particular case. The L.D.F. concluded, says Meltsner, that it could never win "unless the fact that a high proportion of blacks were subject to execution emerged as but one distasteful aspect of a far greater evil." Thus, in 1967 the L.D.F. decided to fight the execution of every man and woman on death row in the U.S., a total then exceeding...
...jury practice of deciding on both guilt and the capital penalty without an intervening chance for a presentencing hearing. The only major contention the L.D.F. had left was that the death penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment. But that legal argument succeeded one year later. The unexpected success, in Meltsner's view, had as much to do with all that had gone before as it did with the specifics in the legal briefs...
...conditions calling for death are rigidly defined under new laws, they may pass constitutional scrutiny. But it is likely that two or more years will go by before the Supreme Court hears the new arguments. By then the U.S. will be nearing a decade without an execution, and Meltsner's "politics of abolition" may be stronger than ever...