{
  "id": "RL30145",
  "type": "CRS Report",
  "typeId": "REPORTS",
  "number": "RL30145",
  "active": false,
  "source": "EveryCRSReport.com",
  "versions": [
    {
      "source": "EveryCRSReport.com",
      "id": 105368,
      "date": "1999-04-19",
      "retrieved": "2016-05-24T20:45:41.749941",
      "title": "Capital Punishment: Summary of Supreme Court Decisions During the 1997-98 Term",
      "summary": "In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court found the death penalty as written in various state laws to be\n\"arbitrary and capricious\". Therefore, the Court found it to be unconstitutional under the Eighth and\nFourteenth Amendments and subsequently, executions throughout the states were stopped. Shortly\nafter that, states began to rewrite their capital-crime laws using the new guidelines promulgated by\nthe Court and capital punishment was resumed in the United States. None of the cases decided\nduring the last term (1997-98) are likely to be remembered as landmark decisions which will impact\nsignificantly on the current drift of the Court in capital punishment decisions. It held in  Breard\nv\nAngelone  that the Eighth Amendment did not require special jury instructions on the concept\nof\nmitigation or on the statutorily defined mitigating factors and that in the context of the case, jurors\nwere unlikely to have misunderstood their obligation to consider mitigating evidence. In the other\ndecision on jury instructions, the Court held in  Hopkins v. Reeves  that instructions on\nlesser offenses\nare constitutionally required only if the state law recognizes them as included in the capital crime\ncharged. In a decision that was critical of action taken by a federal court of appeals to cancel a state\nprisoner's imminent execution, the Court in  Calderon v. Thompson  set an onerous\nstandard for the\nappeals court to meet before it voluntarily recalls a mandate denying habeas relief to the prisoner in\norder to reassess the merits of the prior decision. In the  Breard v. Greene  case, the\nCourt, noting that\nthe procedural rules of the forum state govern the implementation of the treaty in that state, declined\nto halt the state's execution of a foreign national notwithstanding claims by the prisoner and his\ncountry that state officials violated provisions of the treaty. Lastly, the Court in  Ohio Adult\nParole\nAuthority v. Woodard  decided that conferring upon the inmate the option of voluntarily\nparticipating\nin a pre-hearing interview with members of the parole board, without giving him immunity for his\nstatements at the interview, did not compel the inmate to speak and, therefore, did not violate his\nFifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.",
      "type": "CRS Report",
      "typeId": "REPORTS",
      "active": false,
      "formats": [
        {
          "format": "PDF",
          "encoding": null,
          "url": "http://www.crs.gov/Reports/pdf/RL30145",
          "sha1": "0d01a76f4f1d7536d396aefd7360a162fd1341d2",
          "filename": "files/19990419_RL30145_0d01a76f4f1d7536d396aefd7360a162fd1341d2.pdf",
          "images": null
        },
        {
          "format": "HTML",
          "filename": "files/19990419_RL30145_0d01a76f4f1d7536d396aefd7360a162fd1341d2.html"
        }
      ],
      "topics": []
    }
  ],
  "topics": [
    "American Law",
    "Constitutional Questions"
  ]
}