“My findings indicate that many jury verdicts may be a product of jury ignorance, rather than a careful consideration of the evidence presented at trial,” Matthew Dale Kim writes in his University of Florida Levin College of Law article, https://tinyurl.com/r6he4x42 “How Criminal Law Exploits Jury Ignorance.“ Kim’s argument is exemplified by cases in which the defendant’s mental state is at issue. Because several states have added the option of guilty but mentally ill (GBMI) to the traditional guilty, not guilty, and not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) verdicts, juries are increasingly choosing GBMI, mistakenly believing that the verdict will result in psychiatric care for the defendant. But, in reality, according to Kim, it means that GBMI is no different from a guilty verdict, and no psychiatric care is offered. His solution is for the courts to include “plain-language jury instructions on sentencing consequences” when explaining the different verdict options.
In his article, https://www.bjcl.org/ “Restoring Unanimity to the Alabama Death Penalty,” in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, Daniel Butler Friedman notes that “80%of people on death row [in Alabama] were sentenced non-unanimously.” Acknowledging that “This is a surprising fact to many people, including lawyers, who largely believe that the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated non-unanimous juries in 2020,” Friedman argues that “non-unanimous sentencing is unconstitutional under state law,” and that “Alabama’s longstanding and fierce commitment to protecting individual rights to freedom and life via jury unanimity must be recovered in its capital sentencing procedures.”
In March 2025, the US Supreme Court found https://tinyurl.com/3kx56ubt Richard Glossip, sentenced to death in 1998 in Oklahoma, was entitled to a new trial based on evidence that the prosecution in his case withheld exculpatory evidence and allowed their star witness to offer false testimony during his capital trial. The case has been an example of everything wrong with the death penalty since Glossip was arrested and charged with capital murder 27 years ago. But in her Yale Law Journal Forum article https://yalelawjournal.org/forum, “Glossip’s Road Map to Nowhere,” Vida B. Johnson maintains that while the Court’s decision in Glossip v. Oklahoma “was heralded as a victory for the defense…. the decision does little to fix the myriad problems that led to Mr. Glossip’s wrongful conviction.” Johnson argues that “the ordinary judicial process and its purported safeguards were not what saved Mr. Glossip’s life. Rather, it was random chance that came to Mr. Glossip’s aid.”