Reading about famous US criminals of the 20s, 30s, 40s, one thing stands out - the short time between sentence and execution in capital cases. The average seems to be about 6 months to a year.
Now in the US it can take 15 to 20 years to execute someone. What changed and when? Was there some SCOTUS decision that affected things? Were there fewer stages in the appeals process back then? Or did courts just work far more quickly?
What? You late fer lunch or sumptin?
In Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court decided that the death penalty as it stood was unconstitutional, because the death penalty laws as they existed were “arbitrary and capricious”. As part of the reform of the death penalty laws to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision, both states and the federal government adopted mandatory appeals of all death sentences. It’s the appeal process, and the amount of time it takes them to move through the courts, that delays the executions.
Hell, back when, they didn’t even wait for a trial; they just blew you away a-la Bonnie and Clyde.
It does seem to be coming back into fashion if you kill a cop; seems like a lot of those dudes get killed ‘resisting arrest’ lately.
Moderator caution(NOT a warning)
Bosda. Perhaps you simply forgot this is GQ. Either contribute or stifle yerself!
As the first poster after the OP, this just isn’t helpful.
Thanks.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
Moderator Note:
chacoguy. At least if you’re gonna stick in something that doesn’t contribute to the OP, give some better time frames.
What does “back when” mean?
My basic point is, this is General Questions. Try to contribute something more than drive-by musings.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
I apologize, I assumed that most people would have a pretty good idea of when Bonnie and Clyde were killed. i.e. Prohibition era ,early thirties etc.
For those of you keeping score at home, it was 1935.
John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, (two other gangsters of the time) were killed in 1934.
Furman v. Georgia was in 1972.
Without any desire whatsoever to contribute to snarkiness, the real answer seems to be, “How good are you at resurrecting the dead?”
Any other sentence can be reversed, with compensation for the time spent incarcerated, fines unjustly exacted, etc., if it proves that the conviction was in some way flawed. While I don’t want to get into the arguments about the constitutionality and morality of the death penalty in GQ, the easily-verifiable act is that a capital sentence cannot be reversed. Sure, the family can be compensated for an unjust execution, but that doesn’t bring back the innocent or wrongfully convicted deceased. It therefore behooves us to grant every possible reasonable ground for delay pf an execution, to be as certain as possible the guy we’re putting to death “deserved” it – was not falsely convicted in some way. (Note that in addition to appeals, separate sentencing phases of capital trials are often – usually? always? – required, to assure that this particular conviction is in line with the state standards for when the death penalty may be imposed.
Also the courts tend to be more clogged now, plus there were more restrictions.
I read a lot of old true crime from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s and a lot of times you will find newspapers especially, butting in.
They will just go ahead and seize things, which would not be unethically. The New York World and New York Journal were notorious for having “murder squad” reporters.
It got so bad many witnesses were conveniently “forgetting” things or “Gee I have bad eyes” till they got paid.
Now without the limits of law the yellow newspapers could just do what they wanted. Oh sure their reporters would get beat up and such, but they’d also get evidence.
This would lead to quicker and more powerful evidence at trials that took less time to try and left no avenue for appeal.
To add to what others have said, criminal defendants have many more rights than they did before the second half of the twentieth century. Almost all of what we now think of as core criminal rights–adequate counsel, Miranda, routinely enforced protections against unlawful search, equal process protections, etc.–were created in the last 60 years. Poor people weren’t even guaranteed a lawyer until 1963! As you might imagine, the appeals process is a good deal shorter when you don’t have an attorney.
Attempts have been made to make the process faster. In particular, Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) after the Oklahoma City bombings. It radically restricts the ability to bring new legal challenges to the extent that even if you have a new claim that would prove you are innocent you may not get a hearing. IIRC, AEDPA hasn’t greatly increased the speed of the process, but that is in part because states have become more and more reluctant to impose the death penalty in light of high-profile wrongful conviction cases (often involving DNA evidence), among other factors.
It’s also relevant that, after the Court reinstated the death penalty, anti death penalty advocates made a point of filing appeals for the purpose of slowing down death penalty cases and preventing executions. The goal was a de facto moratorium. This worked rather well for awhile until Reagan/Bush appointees appeared in sufficient numbers to tip the balance.
I think that’s out of this book:
I’ve read so many Court books at this point that it’s hard to keep them straight, so it may have been another.