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This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Ethics guide. What is a 'just cause'? On this page What is a 'just cause'? Definitions Page options Print this page. Just causes Self-defence: invasion: The clearest example of a just cause is self-defence against an aggressor.
People with mental illness are more vulnerable to police pressure, are less able to give meaningful assistance to their counsel, and are typically poor witnesses. People who have a mental illness that causes delusions are more likely to insist on representing themselves at trial; they are prone to outbursts in front of their juries and some are so heavily medicated that they appear to have no remorse.
EJI believes that executing people with mental illness is cruel and misguided. After more than three decades of research examining whether the threat of a death sentence deters people from committing aggravated murders, there is no reliable evidence that the death penalty deters murder or that it protects police. The National Research Council of the National Academies concluded that studies claiming the death penalty has a deterrent effect are fundamentally flawed.
Pepper eds. Studies have shown that murder rates, including murders of police officers, are consistently higher in states that have the death penalty, while states that abolished the death penalty have the lowest rates of police officers killed in the line of duty. The likelihood of a death sentence or execution depends more on the county where the crime happened than the severity of the offense. But all state taxpayers have to bear the substantial financial costs of death penalty cases in the handful of counties that cling to this outdated and ineffective policy.
The death penalty is far more expensive than a system in which life imprisonment without parole is the maximum sentence.
Sophisticated studies at the state level show that the death penalty costs taxpayers more than life without parole. Republicans leading a movement for abolition in some of the most conservative states in the country have condemned the death penalty as an expensive government program that is ineffective in deterring crime. A nationwide survey of police chiefs put the death penalty last among their priorities for reducing violent crime—below increasing the number of police officers, reducing drug abuse, and creating a better economy.
Surveyed law enforcement officials said they did not believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder, and they rated it as one of most inefficient uses of taxpayer dollars in fighting crime. Use of the death penalty and public support for it are declining. New death sentences have remained near record lows since after peaking at more than per year in the mids. Executions have declined significantly over the past two decades.
Ten of the 22 states that have abolished the death penalty have done so since : New Jersey , New York , New Mexico , Illinois , Connecticut , Maryland , Delaware , Washington , New Hampshire , and Colorado In , California joined Oregon and Pennsylvania in imposing a moratorium on executions.
And the near-universal opposition to capital punishment among Democratic presidential candidates signifies a major shift from , when Bill Clinton left the campaign trail to oversee an execution in Arkansas. We provide information about death sentences and executions in Alabama—including that the state consistently has one of the highest per capita execution rates in the nation. EJI has been challenging the death penalty for more than 30 years. We represent people who have been sentenced to death and have won relief for over people.
We advocate across the globe and build support for abolition with projects like Just Mercy. EJI won an important victory when the Supreme Court recognized that people with dementia, like our client Vernon Madison, are protected from execution. This is cross-examination. When the prosecution case is complete, the defence follows a similar procedure by calling the witnesses who can be cross-examined by the prosecution.
In a few cases, such as cases involving vulnerable adult or child witnesses, the witness may sit in a separate room in the courthouse and give evidence to the court using video-link equipment.
A vulnerable adult or child may have an intermediary present to help them in giving their evidence to the court. There may be times when the legal professionals and the judge need time to discuss a point of law. The judge will ask the jury to leave the court for a short time. Once the matter has been resolved, the jury will be asked back to the courtroom. When all the evidence has been given, the prosecution and then the defence will make their closing speeches when they will try to convince the jury of their respective cases.
Finally, the judge sums up. This means they will go over the facts of the case and tell you, the jury, about the relevant law.
The judge will also give you advice before you retire to the jury room to discuss the case. Think about their comments carefully as judges are lawyers with years of experience. Inside the jury room jurors discuss the case by carefully considering the evidence presented in court by:. It is an offence, punishable with a fine or imprisonment, for a juror to tell anyone about any statements, opinions, arguments or votes made by jury members while they are considering the case.
If a jury encounters any problems while they are discussing the case amongst themselves, they can contact the judge through the jury keepers for guidance. The jury will be brought back into the courtroom and the judge will remind them that they should not talk to anyone about the case. They will then be formally released until the following morning. When you have reached a verdict, tell the jury keeper and you will be taken back into the courtroom. The court clerk will ask the foreperson to deliver the verdict on each charge.
The foreperson must take care to only answer the questions that the court clerk asks them. When this has been done, your task is over, but stay in the jury box until the judge tells you to leave. If the defendant has been found guilty, the judge may pass sentence immediately. The judge might adjourn the case until reports are made available to the court. They will pass sentence on a different day. The judge will direct the jury about any further attendance or if they are no longer needed. We will not reply to your feedback.
Don't include any personal or financial information, for example National Insurance, credit card numbers, or phone numbers. The gap between death penalty states and non-death penalty states rose considerably from 4 per cent difference in to 25 per cent in Capital punishment may brutalise society in a different and even more fundamental way, one that has implications for the state's relationship with all citizens.
But in many ways the law is inevitably linked with violence - it punishes violent crimes, and it uses punishments that 'violently' restrict human freedoms. And philosophically the law is always involved with violence in that its function includes preserving an ordered society from violent events.
Nonetheless, a strong case can be made that legal violence is clearly different from criminal violence, and that when it is used, it is used in a way that everyone can see is fair and logical. Civilised societies do not tolerate torture, even if it can be shown that torture may deter, or produce other good effects. In the same way many people feel that the death penalty is an inappropriate for a modern civilised society to respond to even the most dreadful crimes.
Because most countries - but not all - do not execute people publicly, capital punishment is not a degrading public spectacle. But it is still a media circus, receiving great publicity, so that the public are well aware of what is being done on their behalf.
However this media circus takes over the spectacle of public execution in teaching the public lessons about justice, retribution, and personal responsibility for one's own actions. In New York and New Jersey, the high costs of capital punishment were one factor in those states' decisions to abandon the death penalty.
In countries with a less costly and lengthy appeals procedure, capital punishment seems like a much cheaper option than long-term imprisonment. It's generally accepted that people should not be punished for their actions unless they have a guilty mind - which requires them to know what they are doing and that it's wrong.
Therefore people who are insane should not be convicted, let alone executed. This doesn't prevent insane people who have done terrible things being confined in secure mental institutions, but this is done for public safety, not to punish the insane person. To put it more formally: it is wrong to impose capital punishment on those who have at best a marginal capacity for deliberation and for moral agency. A more difficult moral problem arises in the case of offenders who were sane at the time of their crime and trial but who develop signs of insanity before execution.
There has been much concern in the USA that flaws in the judicial system make capital punishment unfair. One US Supreme Court Justice who had originally supported the death penalty eventually came to the conclusion that capital punishment was bound to damage the cause of justice:.
The death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of death Jurors in many US death penalty cases must be 'death eligible'. This means the prospective juror must be willing to convict the accused knowing that a sentence of death is a possibility. This results in a jury biased in favour of the death penalty, since no one who opposes the death penalty is likely to be accepted as a juror.
There's much concern in the USA that the legal system doesn't always provide poor accused people with good lawyers. Out of all offenders who are sentenced to death, three quarters of those who are allocated a legal aid lawyer can expect execution, a figure that drops to a quarter if the defendant could afford to pay for a lawyer. Regardless of the moral status of capital punishment, some argue that all ways of executing people cause so much suffering to the condemned person that they amount to torture and are wrong.
Many methods of execution are quite obviously likely to cause enormous suffering, such as execution by lethal gas, electrocution or strangulation. Other methods have been abandoned because they were thought to be barbaric, or because they forced the executioner to be too 'hands-on'. These include firing squads and beheading. Many countries that use capital punishment have now adopted lethal injection, because it's thought to be less cruel for the offender and less brutalising for the executioner.
Those against capital punishment believe this method has serious moral flaws and should be abandoned. The first flaw is that it requires medical personnel being directly involved in killing rather than just checking that the execution has terminated life. This is a fundamental contravention of medical ethics. The second flaw is that research in April showed that lethal injection is not nearly as 'humane' as had been thought.
Post mortem findings indicated that levels of anaesthetic found in offenders were consistent with wakefulness and the ability to experience pain. This is really more of a political argument than an ethical one. It's based on the political principle that a state should fulfil its obligations in the least invasive, harmful and restrictive way possible. Most people will not want to argue with clauses 1 and 2, so this structure does have the benefit of focussing attention on the real point of contention - the usefulness of non-capital punishments in the case of murder.
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