Our broken death penalty

Thank you, Dean Morrison, for the invitation to deliver this year's Madison Lecture, and thank you, Professor Dorsen, for your generous introduction. I am honored to give a lecture on the death penalty here at New York University, the longtime home of some of the most distinguished death penalty lawyers in the country. I am particularly honored because my mother, Judge Betty B. Fletcher, gave the Madison Lecture nineteen years ago, also on the death penalty.