The California Supreme Court and the Death Penalty

Abstract

The California Supreme Court's death penalty decisions provide an ideal vehicle for examining the relationships among judicial selection, individual judicial decision making, and court policy-making. The authors' findings highlight the decisive impact that chief executives can have on judicial decisions through use of the appointment power and the overriding importance of judicial values for explaining judicial decisions. They also develop an integrated model that includes legal variables along with judicial values. Their findings show that liberal and conservative judges sometimes react differently to legal stimuli. Their research also demonstrates that more complete explanations for judicial decisions can be achieved by including legal issues with judicial values in a more complex explanatory model.

Measuring the Preferences of State Supreme Court Judges

“…Following Segal and Cover's example, Emmert and Traut (1994) created preference scores for the justices of the California Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the California example may prove to be special.…”

Bans on Executing the Mentally Retarded: An Event History Analysis of State Policy Adoption

“…The death penalty remains one of the most controversial policy issues in the United States today (e.g., Brace and Hall 1995;Hall and Brace 1996;Emmert and Traut 1994;Traut and Emmert 1998;Mooney and Lee 1999;2000). For those states that retain the death penalty, it is apparent that political officeholders will continue to feel pressure to consider amending the laws in their states to ensure that they are applied fairly.…”

A Neo-Institutional Explanation of State Supreme Court Responses in Search and Seizure Cases

“…But the decisions of other courts, especially higher courts, are also important. Partly this is because precedent is a guide for how to make decisions in the presence of specific fact patterns (Emmert 1992;Emmert and Traut 1994;George and Epstein 1992;Segal 1984Segal , 1986Segal and Spaeth 2002). It is also because precedent is a normative guide for lower courts, especially in cases with novel fact pact patterns (Knight and Epstein 1996;Landes and Posner 1976;Hansford and Spriggs 2006;Wahlbeck 1997).…”

“…There exists a diverse body of research on how lower courts are impacted by Supreme Court precedent (Beiser 1968;Benesh and Reddick 2002;Gruhl 1980;Johnson 1979;Klein and Hume 2003;Emmert and Traut 1994;Hoekstra 2005;Romans 1974). …”