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Because of this case, many states, including Ohio, rewrote their death penalty statutes to allow sentencers to take mitigating factors into account. Subsequently, several death penalty cases were reversed and some death row inmates received sentences other than the death penalty. Sandra Lockett was a 21-year-old woman visiting New Jersey when she met Al Parker and Nathan Earl Dew. Lockett, her fri…
This was the extent of the state's murder case against Sandra Lockett. Under an Ohio law, however:[One who] purposely aids, helps, associates himself or herself with another for the purpose of committing a crime is regarded as if he or she were the principal offender and is just as guilty as if the person performed every act constituting the offense . . . Ironically, Parker, who had actually had …
In considering Lockett v. Ohio, the Court kept in mind a previous landmark death penalty case, Furman v. Georgia (1972). In that case, the Court expressed its dismay at the inconsistency of death penalty sentencing, pointing out that without clear statutory guidelines as to when the death penalty should be administered, courts were prone to discriminate against minority defendants. As a result, ma…
The Court's reasoning was based on three arguments: (1) The Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments require that "in all but the rarest kind of capital [death penalty] case," the sentence be able to take into account the defendant's character and record, as well as any circumstances surrounding the offense that the defendant offers. (2) After a person has been sentenced to prison, he or she might be offe…
The Court said that its Lockett decision simply recognized the principle that punishment should be individual, fitting both the crime and the person who committed the crime as exactly as possible. But, in fact, Lockett considerably broadened that principle. Before Lockett, the state got to decide what evidence was relevant to the death penalty sentence. Ohio's statute, for example, listed the thre…
Mitigating circumstances, or mitigating factors, are facts which, though they do not exonerate the defendant, may serve to reduce the charge or the punishment. In civil actions, for instance, the defense will often ask the jury to consider mitigating circumstances in order to reduce the damages or the extent of the defendant's liability. Thus the legal counsel for a corporation accused of racist h…
In 1830, brothers John Francis Knapp and Joseph Jenkins Knapp conspired to have their wealthy uncle, Captain Joseph White, murdered. They hired Richard Crowninshield to carry out the deed. On the night of 6 April 1830, Crowninshield slew Captain White in his sleep, while the brothers waited outside on the street, 300-feet away. The case was significant because it was the first time that accessorie…
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