"Death Is Different" and Other Twists of Fate

Abstract

Professor Welsh White's book, The Death Penalty in the Nineties, reviews those United States Supreme Court decisions and developments that have occurred in the four years since the publication of his earlier book, The Death Penalty in the Eighties.' In The Nineties, White claims that these recent developments, which have significantly limited capital defendants' habeas corpus appeals, are likely to increase both the rate and the geographical reach of executions which, in the past, have occurred mostly in the South.2 The Nineties' first two chapters are new: a discussion of the Supreme Court's recent death penalty cases (chapter one), and a description of the criminal justice system's application of the death penalty and noted miscarriages of justice (chapter two). The remaining chapters in The Nineties, however, simply repeat the same text presented in The Eighties apart from a one and one-half page