The first half of this course consists of a careful examination of the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence on the subject of the death penalty. We will examine the constitutional regulation of death sentencing, in which the Court has pursued notoriously ill-conceived and contradictory objectives, and the several per se bans on capital
punishment, such as the ban on executing the presently insane and the ban on executing children. We will also examine the issue of race and death sentencing from several constitutional angles. The second half of the course will examine two fundamentally different conceptions of the writ, and how these competing visions have played out in the 1996 reforms of habeas corpus and in the case law before and after the 1996 act. Special attention will be paid to claims of actual innocence in death penalty cases.