Disquieting Discretion: Race, Geography & the Colorado Death Penalty in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century

This Article demonstrates through original statistical research that prosecutors in Colorado were more likely to seek the death penalty against minority defendants than against white defendants. Moreover, defendants in Colorado’s Eighteenth Judicial District were more likely to face a death prosecution than defendants elsewhere in the state. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that even when one controls for the differential rates at which different groups commit statutorily death-eligible murders, non-white defendants and defendants in the Eighteenth Judicial District were still more likely than others to face a death penalty prosecution. Even when the heinousness of the crime is accounted for, the race of the accused and the place of the crime are statistically significant predictors of whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty. We discuss the implications of this disparate impact on the constitutionality of Colorado’s death penalty regime, concluding that the Colorado statute does not meet the dictates of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The pre-raphaelite female muse in Julia margaret cameron’s “idylls of the king” photographs

There has been little discussion of Julia Margaret Cameron’s Idylls of the King photographs over the past decade. My goal with this paper is to bring her Idylls of the King series back into discussion and address its success and relevance in both art history and literature. Scholars Helmut Gernsheim and Marylu Hill have questioned photography as a means to capture the imaginative content of Tennyson’s Arthurian stories and they declared Cameron’s photographs a failure. I argue that her theatrical style, use of props and costumes, obvious posing of her models, and nod to Victorian tableaux vivants capture the true essence of Tennyson’s epic. Her use of the Pre-Raphaelite female muse to portray the Arthurian characters of Elaine, Guinevere, and Vivien places her photographs in direct correlation with Pre-Raphaelite painting as well as popular literature. Her depictions of Tennyson’s epic poem are highly successful and I believe she achieved her personal goal of ennobling photography to the level of High Art.