{"id":1092,"date":"2012-03-22T21:16:50","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T01:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=1092"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:24:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:24:20","slug":"an-emphasis-on-process-over-substance-another-reason-to-abolish-the-death-penalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2012\/03\/22\/an-emphasis-on-process-over-substance-another-reason-to-abolish-the-death-penalty\/","title":{"rendered":"An Emphasis on Process Over Substance: Another Reason to Abolish the Death Penalty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By Mark Wilson<\/p>\n<p><\/em>What has Justice John Paul Stevens been up to in retirement?\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20120625042658\/http:\/\/www.colbertnation.com\/the-colbert-report-videos\/406409\/january-19-2012\/colbert-super-pac---john-paul-stevens\">An interview on\u00a0<em>The Colbert Report<\/em><\/a>, for one. And finding time to write reviews for\u00a0<em>The New York Review of Books<\/em>, for another.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, the recently-retired Justice\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20120625042658\/http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/archives\/2011\/nov\/10\/our-broken-system-criminal-justice\/?pagination=false\">penned a review<\/a>\u00a0of Professor William Stuntz\u2019s book,\u00a0<em>The Collapse of American Criminal Justice<\/em>. Earlier this month, Justice Stevens\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20120625042658\/http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/archives\/2012\/apr\/05\/struggle-police-law\/\">returned to reviewing books on criminal justice<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0<em>The Rape Case: A Young Lawyer\u2019s Struggle for Justice in the 1950s<\/em>.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nJustice Stevens\u2019 review of Professor Stuntz\u2019s book is especially enlightening. It highlights the problems with American criminal justice that come from two vectors: collusion between the executive, judiciary, and legislative branches to be \u201ctough on crime,\u201d and the Constitution\u2019s emphasis on procedural rights over substantive rights. This latter vector leads us to the most undesirable outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>In 2009, Justice Scalia received a fair bit of criticism for\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20120625042658\/http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2009\/08\/18\/scalias-death-row-lunacy.html\">his statement<\/a>\u00a0that the Constitution does not prohibit executing an innocent person. As much as I am not a cheerleader for Justice Scalia, the media focused too much on his statement as indicating what he personally thought. The unfortunate truth is that Justice Scalia\u2019s statement was, in fact, correct. This bizarre proposition seemed to be lost on Scalia critics, which is a shame, because the conversation could have been about so much more than Justice Scalia.<\/p>\n<p>Due to the Constitution\u2019s emphasis on procedural rights, a person who is innocent may nevertheless be convicted and even sentenced to death, so long as the\u00a0<em>procedure<\/em>\u00a0was not defective. Is it unlikely? Indeed it is. There are many safeguards built into the American justice system to prevent this very sort of thing from happening, and most of the time, a person\u2019s innocence will coincide with a procedural deficiency (to include overt or covert prejudice, like racism in jury selection). It\u2019s not\u00a0<em>probable<\/em>\u00a0that the two will be incongruous, but it is\u00a0<em>possible<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>All that the Constitution guarantees is due process. Once you\u2019ve been afforded the process which you are due, the procedural rights of the Constitution wipe their hands and walk away from the table. The procedural emphasis is observable even in the language that we use; a person not convicted of a crime is not<em>innocent<\/em>, but rather is\u00a0<em>not guilty<\/em>. All this means is that the process failed to prove that the person committed the crime, which is sort of the reverse of an innocent person being convicted in the sense that there\u2019s also no obligation that a guilty person be convicted. (At least it\u2019s consistent?)<\/p>\n<p>Certainly this problem is one reason why the death penalty must go. State-mandated termination of human lives should not be dependent upon \u201creasonable doubt,\u201d or any one of the other nebulous, circular phrases used throughout criminal procedure (e.g., what\u2019s a custodial interrogation? It\u2019s when you\u2019re in custody, obviously!). Putting the morality of the whole thing out of the way, execution would require 100% certainty of guilt, and while our system is pretty good, \u201cpretty good\u201d just isn\u2019t enough to kill someone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Mark Wilson What has Justice John Paul Stevens been up to in retirement?\u00a0An interview on\u00a0The Colbert Report, for one. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-hC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}