Capital Punishment in the United States: A Forum on Death-Penalty Issues

Capital Punishment in the United States: A Forum on Death-Penalty Issues
Brooke Masters, William Schabas, James Liebman, Randolph Stone, Joseph Hoffmann

Brooke A. Masters

An 11-year-veteran at the Washington Post, Brooke Masters is a beat reporter covering federal and state appeals courts and criminal justice issues in Virginia. She has previously covered local government and higher education and has served as an assistant editor on the Post's Virginia desk.

In her current position, she has written about everything from espionage to domestic violence to grandparents' visitation rights. For the past 18 months, Masters has paid special attention to the issues of wrongful convictions and the death penalty.

Born and raised in New York City, Masters earned a bachelor's degree in American history from Harvard University. She also took time off from the Post to earn a master's degree in Third World development from the London School of Economics in 1995.

William A. Schabas

Schabas William A. Schabas is director of the Irish Centre for International Rights and holder of the chair in human-rights law at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was formerly professor of international human-rights law and criminal law at the Université de Québec à Montréal.

Schabas is also author of the highly-praised study of the abolition of the death penalty in international law, published by Cambridge University Press.

James S. Liebman

James S. Liebman is Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Since joining the Columbia law faculty, in 1985, Liebman has written extensively on capital punishment and is the senior author of the leading American treatise and a number of articles on habeas corpus law. He has argued four major capital and habeas corpus appeals in the United States Supreme Court.

Liebman was a law clerk to Judge Carl McGowan of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1977 to 1978, and to Justice John Paul Stevens of the US Supreme Court from 1978 to 1979. He also served as assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1979 to 1985, specializing in capital punishment, habeas corpus and education law matters. He has also served as vice-dean of the Columbia Law School.

In addition to publishing numerous books and papers on the death penalty, educational choice and other topics, Liebman has authored op-eds for various publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlanta Constitution, The Nation and New York Newsday. He has also testified before Congress on a number of occasions on fairness and efficiency in death penalty habeas corpus adjudication, among other topics.

Liebman's principal areas of interest are criminal law, evidence, ethics, habeas corpus, the death penalty, equality and equal protection, public interest advocacy, and education and the law. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1974 and his J.D. from Stanford in 1977.

Randolph N. Stone

Randolph N. Stone has served since 1991 as a clinical professor of law and the director of the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. In the clinic, he created the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Project, providing law and social-work students with the supervised opportunity to defend children accused of criminal and delinquent behavior. In addition to individual legal representation, the project is involved in law reform, public education and policy work related to the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Other current clinic projects include employment discrimination and mental health.

From 1988 to 1991, Stone was the first African-American public defender of Cook County, Illinois, responsible for the management of a $32 million budget and the leadership of more than 500 attorneys defending 200,000 clients a year. He was previously a staff attorney and the deputy director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and a partner in the Chicago firm of Stone & Clark, focusing on criminal defense matters, including death penalty cases. He has also worked as an attorney with the Criminal Defense Consortium of Cook County and as a Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellow with the Neighborhood Legal Services Program in Washington, D.C. Stone is a past chair of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section, an organization of more than 5,000 private and public defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges and law professors. He currently serves on the Illinois Supreme Court's Board of Admissions to the Bar and on the boards of directors for Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC), the Sentencing Project, Inc., and the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.

A University of Wisconsin Law School graduate, Stone writes and teaches on issues related to criminal and juvenile justice, clinical legal education, legal ethics, evidence and trial advocacy.

Joseph L. Hoffmann

Joseph L. Hoffmann is the Harry Pratter Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he has been teaching since 1986. He is a nationally renowned expert on the death penalty, habeas corpus, and criminal law and procedure. Hoffmann is the co-author of two books about criminal law and procedure and has written more than two dozen articles about death penalty law. He regularly teaches a course at the National Judicial College on handling capital cases for trial judges, and he has lectured on the subject for state and federal judges, prosecutors and lawyers in Indiana, Illinois, New York, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia and Tennessee. He has also served as a consultant in numerous criminal cases argued before the United States Supreme Court, including nine capital cases.

Hoffmann was educated at Harvard College and the University of Washington School of Law. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Savannah, Georgia, and for then-Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist of the US Supreme Court. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and the University of Tokyo in Japan, and he has lectured about American criminal law and procedure at more than 20 universities throughout Europe and Asia.