CU law faculty cited in recent High Court rulings

By Kathleen E. Rourke

Recent decisions by both the U.S. Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals have cited articles by six Cornell Law School faculty members: Professors of law Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen Garvey, Sheri Johnson and Gary Simson; John Blume, associate professor and director, Cornell Death Penalty Project; and Martin Wells, Cornell professor of biological statistics and computational biology and elected member of the Law School faculty.

Blume

Simson

"It's remarkable for so many members of one law faculty to be cited in important court decisions in a single term," said David Wippman, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law at Cornell Law School. "It's a real tribute to the productivity and quality of our faculty."

In People v. Stephen LaValle, the New York State Court of Appeals upheld Stephen LaValle's rape and murder convictions, but vacated the death sentence. Part of the court's decision (available online at the Law School's Legal Information Institute [LII] at http://www.law.cornell.edu/ny/ctap/) was based on a study of South Carolina jury deliberations published by Eisenberg and Wells in "Victim Characteristics and Victim Impact Evidence in South Carolina Capital Cases," 88 Cornell Law Review 306 (2003). The court also cited an article by Garvey, "Aggravation and Mitigation in Capital Cases: What do Jurors Think?" from the 98 Columbia Law Review 1538-76 (1998). The court stated: "These studies provide the best available insight into jury behavior. ... Indeed, a key motivation for jurors to vote for the death penalty is undoubtedly their fear that a defendant will otherwise pose a danger on the streets (see Garvey, 98 Columbia Law Review, 1560; see also Blume, Garvey, Johnson, "Future Dangerousness in Capital Cases: Always 'At Issue,'" 86 Cornell Law Review 397 [2001]). Our State Constitution does not permit a death sentence imposed by jurors who may have chosen that option based on rank speculation about a defendant's eventual release into society." In addition to requesting resentencing for LaValle, the court asked for new instructions from the New York Legislature regarding deadlocked juries.

In July, in Schriro v. Summerlin (available online at http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that its earlier decision in Ring v. Arizona, requiring that juries rather than judges decide between life imprisonment and the death penalty, does not apply retroactively. Justice Scalia, delivering the opinion of the court, referred to two articles from the Cornell Law Review, including "Deadly Confusion: Juror Instructions in Capital Cases," by Eisenberg and Wells. The court also cited an article by Garvey, "The Emotional Economy of Capital Sentencing," 75 New York University Law Review 26-73 (2000). "When so many presumably reasonable minds continue to disagree over whether juries are better fact finders at all, we cannot confidently say that judicial fact finding seriously diminishes accuracy as to produce an 'impermissibly large risk' of injustice," Scalia wrote in his opinion for the court.

In the Supreme Court ruling on Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain et al., Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the court on a civil case in which Dr. Humberto Alvarez-Machain claimed the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) orchestrated his abduction from Mexico in order to file criminal charges against him in the United States in a case involving his purported role in the torture and murder of a DEA agent. Alvarez-Machain sued one of the DEA abductors, Francisco Sosa, for violating customary international law. In his opinion, Souter held that Alvarez-Machain was not entitled to a remedy under either the Federal Tort Claims Act or the Alien Tort Statute. Souter's opinion quoted Simson's article in 36 Cornell International Law Journal 125-33 (2003): "It is true that the traditional approach to choice of substantive tort law has lost favor, Simson, 'The Choice-of-Law Revolution in the United States: Notes on Rereading Von Mehren,' ... ('The traditional methodology of place of wrong ... has receded in importance, and new approaches and concepts such as governmental interest, analysis, most significant relationship, and better rule of law have taken center stage')." The full text of the opinion is available online at http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-339.ZS.html.