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JURIST Guest Columnist Olga Vlasova, Brooklyn Law School Class of 2013, is the Sparer Public Interest Law Fellow. She argues for prohibiting the death penalty for severely mentally ill offenders...

According to Mental Health America, about 10 percent of all death row inmates suffer from a serious mental illness. Although a severely mentally ill inmate on death row may have his execution delayed due to incompetency, once the individual has regained competence, he can be executed. The Supreme Court has never ruled that the US Constitution prohibits sentencing severely mentally ill offenders to death.

Death-penalty opponents are gearing up for the possible abolition of capital punishment in California. They’d see it as a major victory, writes David Dow, but they shouldn’t.

Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photos

An inmate stares out a window at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Calif., March 2, 2012.

If California dumps the death penalty this November, abolitionists will probably dance in the streets. But they shouldn’t, because the state would be abandoning one terrible idea only to replace it with another.

WASHINGTON — The campaign to abolish the death penalty has been freshly invigorated this month in a series of actions that supporters say represents increasing evidence that America may be losing its taste for capital punishment.

One of the issues driving protesters participating in the April 24, 2012 Occupy The Justice Department demonstration is an issue that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder knows well: prosecutorial misconduct.

Holder knows this misconduct issue well because he has criticized it during congressional testimony, in fact as recently as March 2012 when he was commenting on a special prosecutor’s report castigating the wrongdoing of federal prosecutors.