Straight is the Gate: Capital Clemency in the United States from Gregg to Atkins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article will examine executive clemency decisions in capital cases, from 1977, the year of the first execution after the Supreme Court sanctioned the resumption of executions in Gregg v. Georgia, until June of 2002, when Atkins v. Virginia was decided. The power of the executive to grant clemency to a capital defendant can be viewed as a gateway -- one last chance to be spared capital punishment. The gateway to clemency has been exceedingly narrow in this quarter century era of capital punishment. Perhaps surprisingly, it has been very narrow indeed for the three classes of capital prisoners who are the focus of this Beyond Atkins Symposium, and who might be expected to be particularly suitable candidates for clemency, i.e., juveniles, the mentally retarded, and the mentally ill. Clemency decisions are of course fraught for those at the threshold of execution, but they are also fraught for governors and Presidents charged with deciding clemency. This Article will also explore the narrow path the decision makers walk as they confront the moral and political risks the clemency power entails.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".