Who lives and who dies?
“Stay in role!” exhorts Professor Carol Steiker ’86, as some 90 students in her upper-level course Capital Punishment in America split into groups for an exercise in which they’ll argue whether a death sentence should be reversed due to ineffective assistance of counsel. “Don’t say, ‘If I were the lawyer, I would…’”...The exercise is based on Rompilla v. Beard, decided in June 2005 by the U.S. Supreme Court, 5-4, in favor of the petitioner. The case was one of the last that Sandra Day O’Connor heard before she retired; she sided with the majority, overturning a 3rd Circuit decision written by Samuel A. Alito Jr.—who took her seat on the high court.