Abstract
In 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States, allowing optimism to trump experience, accepted various states’ assurances that new death penalty procedures the states had then recently adopted would avoid the vices that had led the Court to strike down the death penalty in 1972. Now, some thirty years later, a body of evidence has developed demonstrating that this experiment has failed—that the problems of arbitrariness, racism and propensity to error are endemic to the criminal justice system (particularly with regard to capital punishment) and cannot be cured by what Justice Blackmun called “tinker[ing] with the machinery of death.” Despite the Court’s best intentions, the death penalty procedures of the 1980s and 1990s and the first half of this decade reflect little if any significant improvement over the condemned pre-1972 systems.
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