届华政杯初赛试题.docVIP

第五届“华政杯”全国法律翻译大赛初赛试题 试题一 (325 words) The U.S. Supreme Court has not squarely confronted the death penaltys constitutionality since the 1970s. In that decade, the Court actually ruled both ways on the issue. In McGautha v. California, the Court first held in 1971 that a jurys imposition of the death penalty without governing standards did not violate the Fourteenth Amendments Due Process Clause. But then in 1972, in the landmark case of Furman v. Georgia, the Court interpreted the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to hold that death sentences—as then applied—were unconstitutional. In that five-to-four decision, delivered in a per curiam opinion with all nine Justices issuing separate opinions, U.S. death penalty laws were struck down as violations of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The sentences of the “capriciously selected random handful” of those sentenced to die, one of the Justices wrote, are “cruel and unusual in the same way being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” Other Justices also emphasized the arbitrariness of death sentences, with some focusing on the inequality and racial prejudice associated with them. Four years later, the Supreme Court reversed course yet again, approving once more the use of executions. After thirty-five states reenacted death penalty laws in the wake of Furman, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of death penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia and two companion cases. The Court ruled that laws purporting to guide unbridled juror discretion—and requiring capital jurors to make special findings or to weigh “aggravating” versus “mitigating” circumstances—withstood constitutional scrutiny. The Court in Gregg emphasized that the Model Penal Code itself set standards for juries to use in death penalty cases. Only mandatory death sentences, the Court ruled that year, were too severe and thus unconstitutional. In its decision in Woodson v. North Carolina, the Court explicitly ruled mandatory death sentences, th