This latter group includes Professor Steven Duke, who, both in his recent book with Albert Gross [FN3] and in his lead commentary [FN4] here, displays an unremitting commitment to redefining the debate on drugs. He powerfully catalogues how possibly cynical legislators have turned drug-prohibition statutes into dangerous instruments permitting use of the death penalty and other "savage" crimina...

This paper examines opinions by Supreme Court justices of the most significant death penalty cases of the 1970s and 1980s [i. We seek to determine: 1) what main justifications were used by justices to support their own opinions; 2) how inconsistent over these cases were justices in issuing their opinions; and 3) what factors led to changes in opinions across time. We examine three types of inco...

This paper describes the experiences of a sociologist as a mitigation expert during the "typical" first degree murder case, from indictment through the penalty phase of the trial. The author, who has worked in death penalty cases (capital murder) since 1988, has served as a mitigation expert in over 40 such cases. Topics covered include: working with a death penalty mitigation team and what to ...

This article provides crucial information to judge the appropriateness of the Mexican version of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third Edition and recognizes some limitations in both the process of its adaptation to the Mexican population and the norm development process. This is an effort to contribute to the debate initiated by Suen and Greenspan (2008), who argued in court against the ...

We propose a model of investment, duration, and exit strategies for start-ups backed by venture capital (VC) funds that accounts for the high level of uncertainty, the asymmetry of information between insiders and outsiders, and the discount rate. Our analysis predicts that start-ups backed by corporate VC funds remain for a longer period of time before exiting and receive larger investment amo...

Under our federal system of government, every state, and the federal government, has its own set of criminal laws. This means that Congress and each state legislature must determine whether to enact capital punishment in its jurisdiction. Today, 38 states and the federal government have death-penalty laws. These laws apply only to first-degree murders, those done with deliberation and calculati...

What explains the difference between the United States and the many other countries that have abolished capital punishment? Because the United States and many other nations that have abolished the death penalty are democracies, there seems to be an obvious answer: abolition or retention reflects the preferences of the electorate. According to this view, the U.S. electorate is simply more puniti...

Two economically important elements of social capital are trust and disciplining free-riders. Most of current research focuses on trust. We argue that research should shift focus toward informal sanctions. We present two experimental studies from Switzerland, Byelorussia and Russia to support this argument. Our first study elicits trust and cooperative preferences in a public goods game and fin...