Alan Dershowitz’s greatest impact on American law likely came at the beginning of his career. In 1963, Justice Arthur Goldberg tasked him to help build an argument against what had, until then, gone unquestioned: the constitutionality of capital punishment. Dershowitz—then a young Supreme Court clerk, now a Harvard University law professor emeritus—compiled some of the earliest statistics on racial disparities in the death penalty. Every case he found in which a rapist had been sentenced to death, for example, involved a black defendant and a white victim.Goldberg’s eventual dissent in a death-penalty petition did not include this research. According to …read more
Source:: The New Republic
