“The Lasting Impact of Ring v. Arizona on Capital Jury Trials”

The title of this post is the title of this new article authored by Kevin Morrow and now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

The final decision on the imposition of the death penalty in the United States is made by either judges or juries.  A wealth of empirical study has gone into comparing these two methods.  Arizona, with its change to a jury-based system immediately after the landmark Supreme Court decision Ring v. Arizona, is divided into discrete eras of capital sentencing.  For the first time, this article catalogs, and examines, the post-Ring capital trials that reached the question of life or death to explore the systemic differences between jury and judge sentencings.