Papers

1. Dissecting the ABA Texas Capital Punishment Assessment Report of 2013: Death and Texas, a Surprising Improvement

   In September 2013, the American Bar Association published a 517-page report on Texas's death penalty.

2. The Attorney-Client Working Relationship: A Comparison of In-Person Versus Videoconferencing Modalities

   When the pandemic shut down courthouses in 2020, judges and lawyers had to figure out, almost overnight, whether the constitutional guarantee of "the assistance of counsel" could be delivered through a video screen.

3. Nothing Changes, It All Remains the Same: Modern Capital Punishment (Human Sacrifice by a Different Name)

   For Texas Tech's annual criminal law symposium, Professor Arnold Loewy gave the panel a single question to wrestle with: is capital punishment a good idea or a bad idea?

4. Feed Me Seymour: The Never-Ending Hunger of the Criminal Process for Procedural Rights and Removing Children from Its Shop of Horrors

   Professor Patrick Metze was asked a simple question at a Texas Tech criminal law symposium: should children accused of crimes have more, fewer, the same, or different legal protections than adults?

5. Speaking Truth to Power: The Obligation of the Courts to Enforce the Right to Counsel at Trial

   The Sixth Amendment guarantees every person charged with a crime the right to a lawyer.

6. Plugging the School to Prison Pipeline by Addressing Cultural Racism in Public Education Discipline

   You may have heard the phrase "school-to-prison pipeline." It names the path by which a child's misbehavior at school stops being handled by a teacher or a principal and starts being handled by police, courts, and probation officers.

7. Death and Texas: The Unevolved Model of Decency

   Texas law now defines 146 separate ways a person can be sentenced to die. This 2011 Nebraska Law Review article argues the state capital system has grown back into the arbitrary machine the Supreme Court struck down in 1972.

8. Troy Davis, Lawrence Brewer, and Timothy McVeigh Should Still Be Alive: Certainty, Innocence, and the High Cost of Death and Immorality

   On September 21, 2011, two men were executed on the same day.