McCord on Drugs and Death Sentencing

David McCord (Drake University Law School) has posted Lethal Connection: The 'War on Drugs' and Death Sentencing (The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, Vol. 15, pages 1-26, 2012) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Many defendants on death row committed murders in which illegal drugs were somehow involved. This Article attempts to explain and quantify the involvement of drugs in the cases of death-sentenced defendants during the six year period of 2004 to 2009 and to imagine the ways that death rows would look different if there had been no "War on Drugs." The Article will aslo examine the effects of drug-involved death sentences with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity (particularly Latino ethnicity).