Newspapers and the Supreme Court: In re Capital Punishment

Abstract

This paper examines how the Supreme Court and newsprint media interface with and react to each other’s arguments, justification, and framing of the death penalty. As the philosophical justification behind the use of capital punishment evolves, how can we describe the similarities and differences between how the Supreme Court frames issues of capital punishment and how the press portrays the same? Using a case-study analysis, this paper identifies three sets of chronologically- related and issue-related death penalty cases (from 1971 to 2005) and compares the presence and importance of the varying Supreme Court arguments and newspaper frames. I find that, while the Supreme Court appears to set the boundaries of the death penalty debate for newsprint media, the latter may actually set the agenda of the Court when it strategically 1.) makes comparisons to foreign legal practices or 2.) alleges that caprice and bias pervade through the American capital punishment mechanism.