Beginning in 2000, the death penalty began a “free fall” spurred by the use of DNA evidence, said Steiker. quickly went to being one of the world’s leading executors every year.”īut then things changed again.

And for the next 25 years - the 25 years that included the story of Walter McMillian’s conviction and death sentence - American death sentences soared,” said Steiker. Four years later, the “American death penalty was back in business with a vengeance, as we might say. practice something of a “historical accident” in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to declare it unconstitutional in 1972 because governing statutes “gave sentencers too much discretion that yielded arbitrary and discriminatory results.”īlowback from the court of public opinion, a crime wave, and the administrations of two Republican presidents who appointed five justices to the court soon led to another pendulum swing. “We remain today the only developed Western democracy that continues to retain the death penalty,” said Steiker, who directs the Criminal Justice Policy Program at the Law School and has written extensively on capital punishment. ’85, working to free innocent death row inmate Walter McMillian, played by Jamie Foxx - Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker noted that makes the United States No. Yet, at a talk in Boston following a recent screening of the film - which stars Michael B. “ Just Mercy,” the film based on the memoir of the same name by Harvard Law graduate Bryan Stevenson, ends with a sobering statistic: For every nine people executed in this country, one person on death row has been exonerated.

Just mercy novel