Criminal Justice Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States: 1988 Term

Abstract

The 1988 Term of the Supreme Court of the United States ended on July 3, 1989. There were important decisions in the areas of the Fourth Amendment and the right to counsel, and there were several forays into the less clearly demarcated waters of the right to a fair trial and sentence. Two death penalty cases resumed the preceding term's consideration of capital punishment for persons under the age of 18, and another dealt with imposition of the penalty upon mentally retarded offenders. The balance of the Court's criminal justice agenda included a wide array of issues such as double jeopardy, prisoners' rights, racketeering laws, habeas corpus, civil rights actions, and the First Amendment. Some of the cases in these categories are beyond the scope of the present survey, as is the term's major abortion case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 109 S.Ct. 3040 (1989), which arose in the civil context.