OSJCL Death Penalty Symposium Issue

I received the hard copies of the Fall 2019 issue of Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, v. 17 no. 1, yesterday. It includes a symposium on capital punishment. My contribution is online here.

Mine is the sole pro-death-penalty contribution, but one is vastly better than none, and none is the norm for politically incorrect viewpoints in academia. I thank Doug Berman, who genuinely cares about diversity of viewpoint, for the invitation.

The guest editor’s note at the beginning of the issue says this is “a symposium on the abolition of the death penalty.” That’s news to me. I was told the topic was “lessons that we can learn from the perseverance of the death penalty in so many states (such as Ohio),” but that I could focus on a broader topic. I decided to keep with the overall “lessons” theme but focus on the lessons to be learned from the failure of judicial activism, which I believe has caused more problems than it has fixed in this area.

My article is titled, Tinkering with the Machinery of Death: Lessons from a Failure of Judicial Activism. The cite is 17 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 131 (2019).