The major criminal-justice-reform bill that looked so promising last October has stalled in the U.S. Senate. But 2015 was still a big year for developments in federal criminal law. At the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, the justices insisted on a higher standard for mens rea (Elonis v. United States), rejected prosecutorial overreach (Yates v. United States), and enforced Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless seizures (Rodriguez v. United States). But two cases stand out as especially important.
First, in Glossip v. Gross, the court considered the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s three-drug death-penalty procedure. The Court ruled 5-4 that the procedure did not violate the Eighth Amendment. But the big news came in a dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer and joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. For 40 years, challenges to the death penalty have focused on methods. But Breyer’s dissent reopened the question whether the death penalty itself is unconstitutional. Two weeks later, the Court got its first request to stay an execution based on the unconstitutionality of the death penalty. With the resurrection of this question in the lower courts, some think Glossip could mark the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America.
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