There's been quite a bit of criminal law news this past week: 1. The controversy over the Bowden case and its interpretation of life sentences continues. Governor Perdue has a new legal argument for not releasing the inmates who appear to be affected by the ruling, and the inmates are planning to test that argument in court. The News and Observer's latest story is here. 2. Cindy Adcock, a professor at Charlotte School of Law, has a new article on SSRN that's getting some attention. A summary of the article and a link to it are available here; the gist is that if and when all the issues surrounding North Carolina's execution protocol are resolved, there will be an unprecedented wave of executions that will tax Governor Perdue's clemency process. My impression is that she's right that the de facto moratorium over the past few years has resulted in there being a large "backlog" of death row inmates who have completed post-conviction review and are awaiting execution dates -- but I wonder if litigation under the new Racial Justice Act will move some of those cases out of the queue. 3. Also in the world of capital punishment: in the wake of the failed exectution of Romell Broom, Ohio has become the first state to adopt a single-drug execution protocol -- inmates will be put to death by a massive overdose of anesthetic. Some death penalty critics have argued that such a protocol is more humane than using the three-drug cocktail [...]
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