SelectedWorks @ Widener University Commonwealth Law School
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New Federalism and Constitutional Criminal Procedure: Are We Repeating the Mistakes of the Past?
No full textMore than thirty years have passed since the United States Supreme Court made these observations in the landmark case of Mapp v. Ohio. The Court, no doubt, thought it was putting an end to the wrenching problems that developed since it laid the groundwork for the exclusionary rule in Boyd v. United States in 1886. Although the merits of the exclusionary rule have been debated for many years and will be debated for years to come, the advent of the exclusionary rule raised important issues of federalism that were not resolved easily
A Pro-Death, Self-Fulfilling Constitutional Construct: The Supreme Court’s Evolving Standard of Decency for the Death Penalty
No full textIn recent Eighth Amendment decisions applying the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to substantive challenges to the death penalty, a plurality of the United States Supreme Court has favored employing only the evolving standards of decency test of constitutionality, purportedly because it is an objective measurement of cruelty and unusualness. The Article will show, however, that contrary to the assertions of some Court members, the indicia for ascertaining the evolving standard of decency are far from objective. Rather, the evidence gleaned from he objective indicia of legislative enactments and jury sentencing behavior can be and has been rigged to favor death, both through the selective evaluation of legislative enactments and the creation of procedural rules that slant juror decisionmaking toward death sentences.This Article concludes that to counter the manipulability of the objective prongs of the evolving standards test and the resultant self-fulfilling nature of the entire jurisprudential construct, the Court should consider all state capital punishment legislation, and should not confine its consideration only to American conceptions of decency. Continued reliance on the Court\u27s own assessment of proportionality and the furtherance of penological goals as additional constitutional benchmarks is also necessary to prevent the self-fulfilling nature of the evolving standards construct from eliminating any real constrain on the penalty
A Mortgage By Any Other Name: A Plea for the Uniform Treatment of Installment Land Contracts and Mortgages Under the Bankruptcy Code
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Setting the Legal Context: What is the Meaning of Equal Access to Mental Health Services, in Model State Mental Health Plan for Deaf Persons
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National Banks and Section 91: Protection from Judgment Creditors Pending Appeal
No full textAlthough the National Bank Act was enacted over 100 years ago, national banking associations (national banks) have only recently realized the full benefits of Section 91 of the Act
