Perhaps law professors should confine themselves to explaining the law to their students and showing how it works based upon the best evidence available. “The American legal professoriate has tirelessly pursued an expose’ of American sentencing policy as unjustly harsh,” George Mason University Law School professor Craig Lerner wrote last year in an article which appeared in the Wisconsin Law Review. “If Exhibit A in this critique is the persistence of the death penalty on American soil, Exhibit B has become the prevalence of LWOP [life without parole] sentences—and not simply the prevalence, but the haphazard and irrational nature with which the penalty is imposed.”
“LWOP, the argument runs, is dispensed without careful attention to either the nature of the crime or the culpability of the criminal.”
Lerner undertook to investigate these claims in his article, and found them wanting. “Who’s really sentenced to life without parole?” he asked. “The answer, at least in the eight states studied in this Article, is overwhelmingly murderers and other violent criminals.”
Indeed, he found that:
- In Wisconsin, of 229 inmates serving life without parole, 192 were convicted of murder;
- In Iowa, of 649 inmates serving life without parole, 507 were convicted of murder, another 13 of murder and kidnapping, and yet another five of murder and sex crimes;
- In the state of Washington, out of 626 inmates serving life without parole, 335 were convicted of murder;
- In Arkansas, all 593 of the inmates serving life without parole were convicted of murder;
- In Georgia, 599 of the 943 inmates serving life without parole were convicted of murder;
- In South Carolina, of the 988 inmates serving life without parole, 693 were convicted of murder;
- In Alabama, of the 1,493 inmates serving life without parole, 936 were convicted of murder; and
- In Florida, of the 7,351 inmates serving life without parole, 3,513 were convicted of murder and another 416 of attempted murder.
