After hundreds of years of precedent, why does the law surrounding the death penalty continue to produce significant and monumental legal decisions?

"Because the application of the death penalty in modern America always raises new issues big and small, philosophical and practical, state and federal courts will always be confronting and resolving significant and consequential legal questions. Just this past term, for example, new medical evidence and new stories of botched executions required the U.S. Supreme Court justices to consider the constitutionality of lethal injection protocols, and new legislative developments in the states required the justices to consider the constitutionality of child rape as a death-eligible crime. And though capital punishment laws and practices impact only a tiny portion of our massive criminal justice system, the symbolic and emotional significance of the death penalty all but ensures that evolving attitudes and new insights will keep this area of the law in the news and in the courts."

Douglas A. Berman
William B. Saxbe Designated Professor of Law