The Department of Law invites you to Linnaeus Law Talks.
Lecturer
Emma Ricknell is a senior lecturer in Political Science at Linnaeus University. She defended her PhD thesis on state level death penalty legislation in the United States in 2021. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she worked as a paralegal handling death penalty appeals at the Habeas Corpus Resource Center in San Francisco.
Abstract
Traditionally, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has relied on some idea of a national consensus to define the boundaries of cruel and unusual punishment. That consensus, however, has fractured into a geographical patchwork at the state level, ranging from jurisdictions that abolished the death penalty in the mid nineteenth century to contemporary de facto abolitionist states, as well as those actively pursuing executions using newly adopted or contested execution protocols. This lecture focuses on these spatial divergences and examines the role of the judiciary in managing, and perhaps, sustaining, capital punishment within an increasingly polarized federal system.
The event is open to everyone and does not require pre-registration. Participation can take place physically or digitally via Zoom.
