Write an essay (1,000-1,250 words) that presents arguments for and against the abolishment of the death penalty. In your essay, be sure to do the following: Include statistics regarding the use of the death penalty as a deterrent. Explain how the death penalty has impacted law enforcement. Explain if there is or is not empirically verified support for the use of the death penalty as a deterrent to crime. Use the GCU eLibrary to locate scholarly, authoritative sources to support your claims. Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
This assignment uses a grading rubric. Instructors will be using the rubric to grade the assignment; therefore, students should review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the assignment criteria and expectations for successful completion of the assignment. Lecture Note: Module 2 Lecture JUS 505 Lecture 2 Added On: May,08 2013 Added On: IntroductionThe American jury system has changed significantly through the years. For a long time, women were excluded from juries, as were minorities. It was not until 1967 that the Alabama State Supreme Court ruled women could not be excluded from criminal juries.
The Supreme Court was attempting to protect the “weaker sex” from the filth, obscenity, and noxious atmosphere it believed pervaded a criminal trial. Juries were (and currently still are) selected from voter-registration lists. Areas where minorities are discriminated against in terms of voter registration are obviously lacking in minority representation in juries as well. For instance, in Dallas County, Texas, the handbook for prosecution attorneys contains the following instructions: You are not looking for a fair juror, but rather a strong, biased, and sometimes hypocritical individual who believes the
The Term Paper on The Death Penalty 3
The death penalty is a capital punishment that is put into effect for major crimes. The death penalty is a very controversial topic in the United States and throughout the world. There was a time period were the death penalty was banned for about four years in 1972-1976. Many feel that the death penalty is justice because it is retribution toward criminals who have committed heinous crimes. ...
Defendants are different from them in kind, rather than degree. (Waller, 2009, p. 103) Trial by a Jury of Peers? Regardless of the criminal charge, it is fairly obvious that a young black urban male tried by a jury of middle-aged white males (or white females) could not possibly be tried by a jury of his peers. The general public acceptance of the requirement that juries be representational of the community from which they are drawn has brought forth the following question: What is the value of selecting juries that are genuine cross sections of the community?
All jurisdictions in this country rely on a computerized version of the earliest method of jury selection, which took place in England hundreds of years ago by random drawing of names by lot. The basic procedure has not changed in 800 years; the basic concept has not changed. The pool of people from which the jury is selected must represent a fair and balanced cross section of the local population. Although, sometimes the particular jury a person gets may not itself be a cross section of the community.
As long as the jurors were initially randomly summoned from a representative list, the democratic nature of the process itself is said to have been preserved. The true cross-sectional jury is relatively recent. As of 1960, juries in federal criminal cases were selected from blue-ribbon pools, based on the theory that federal justice required people of high intelligence, morality, and integrity. Jury commissioners usually solicited the names of men of recognized intelligence and probity from lists of key men in the community.
The jury selection and Service Act of 1968 abolished this practice. As of 1975, the U. S. Supreme Court expanded the cross-sectional jury concept to state juries based on the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a fair and impartial jury trial by a defendant’s peers, selected from the community population. The Congressional act and the Supreme Court ruling came in response to the discrimination practiced under the guise of selecting elite jurors. Selecting jurors using the elite model allowed convenient cover for the systematic exclusion of certain people, including minorities.
The Essay on The Judicial System Jury Jurors Trial
This is very long, I just didn't wrap the words The Judicial System The justice system in our country today, is one of the best in the world, but it is not without problems. The 12-person Jury system has good intent but has definite faults and should be rethought and possibly revamped. The system was designed so that when charged with a crime, a person could be fairly tried by an impartial jury of ...
It also allowed for the perpetuation of the all-white jury in the South nearly a century after the Supreme Court outlawed the practice. The Common-Law Ideal and the Cross-Sectional ConceptThe Supreme Court said in a 1975 ruling in Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U. S. 522 (1975) that only “representative” juries are “impartial” juries. This goes along with the English common law concept of an impartial juror as one who could temporarily forget his own interests and preconceptions and decide the case before him or her solely on the evidence presented in court.
This common law notion of impartiality requires a high standard of jurors. They not only should be independent from the dictates of others, but also from their own biases and opinions. Unfortunately, the ideal of the cross-sectional juror rejects this common-law concept of impartiality. It requires jurors to be the bearers of the diverse populations from where they are selected so that the perspectives of the race, gender, and ethnic backgrounds of the neighborhood are represented.
The juror deliberations are considered impartial (under the new definition) when group differences are not eliminated (which they would be under common law), but rather embraced and fairly represented. If the jury as a whole is balanced in terms of bringing the diverse views held by a heterogeneous society, then as a whole it will be impartial, even though no one juror is. The new purpose of the cross-sectional juror is to give voice to a multitude of diverse interests, almost as if the juror had been specifically sent to vote the preferred verdict of a constituency.
However, the vision of democracy tied to different groups voting their own specific interests does not inspire confidence in the jury as an institution of justice. The difference between the application of these two approaches is crucial. In the common-law approach to jury selection, for instance, it makes no difference what race jurors are, as long as the jury selection process makes all persons equally eligible for jury duty, then justice is satisfied.
The Term Paper on Whether Trial By Jury Should Be Abolished In The English Legal System?
Jury selection is laid down in the Juries Act 1994. While it is proven that there are reasonable alternatives to a jury trial and that there is no doubt that jury trial is both time consuming and expensive when compared with trial by magistrates or by a judge alone, however the right to a jury trial shall not be dismissed so lightly. The anti jury lobby deems the jury system unpopular the ...
In the cross-sectional proportional representation view, however, an all-white jury cannot possibly be fair to a black defendant, regardless of how fair and unbiased the procedures are for jury selection. Taylor v. LouisianaThis was the essential argument in the Taylor case, made before the Supreme Court in 1975. Billy Taylor was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by a Louisiana jury for aggravated kidnapping. Taylor appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, claiming that his right to a jury representative of his community was denied to him by the systematic underrepresentation of women on the jury list.
Given a lack of showing of any bias or prejudice to the defendant during his trial, a minority of the Court voted to uphold his conviction and dismissed his charge of underrepresentation of women as harmless error in his case. However, a majority of the Court, despite not finding any bias to Taylor, ruled that he was in fact denied his constitutional right to an impartial jury because, by definition, his jury was not impartial unless it was drawn from a representative sample of all segments of the community, including women. ConclusionIn a landmark 1975 ruling, the U.
S. Supreme Court ruled that an impartial jury was one which was representative of the community from which it came. Going against the traditional definition of “impartial,” which historically had meant the mental state of an individual juror to hear evidence with dispassionate neutrality, the Court gave new meaning to the term, ruling that it meant representing diverse interests and the full range of the community’s prejudices. References Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U. S. 522 (1975).
Waller, Bruce T. (2009).
You Decide! Current Debates in Criminal Justice. Boston: Pearson.
