The Scholar and Mentor

• Author: Michael L. Radelet
• Position: Professor, Department of Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Sciences, University of Colorado-Boulder
• Pages: 1965-1967

1965

The Scholar and Mentor

Michael L. Radelet

While David Baldus died far too early, his contributions to death

penalty scholarship will live on. Undoubtedly, death penalty historians a

century from now will still be studying his work. His research has already had

tremendous impacts on the field of capital punishment, but it is quite

possible his work will most greatly impact generations who are not yet in law

school and not yet in positions from which they can use his work to affect

public policy. We can only imagine that future generations will be a bit

surprised when they realize that David Baldus’s work has not already directly

led states to totally abandon the death penalty.

The impact of such scholarship is evident through citations by authors

of scholarly articles and by appellate judges in their decisions. By that

measure, he and Professor Hugo Adam Bedau will undoubtedly be

remembered as the two most influential death penalty scholars of the past

half-century.

But David Baldus has had a much deeper impact than that of his

published scholarly works. He was, and through his example continues to

be, among the most unusually talented and dedicated mentors that I have

ever encountered.

We first met some thirty years ago in the office of Jack Boger at the

NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. I was a first-year assistant

professor, trained in medical sociology, who joined the faculty at the

University of Florida just a few months after Florida had become the first

state in the modern era to execute a prisoner who had not dropped his

appeals.1 I quickly decided to get involved in anti-death penalty efforts,

although the only fodder I had for the fight was idealism and principle, not

training in law or criminology.

Jack Boger, now Dean of the University of North Carolina School of

Law in Chapel Hill, served as the attorney for a Georgia death row inmate

named Warren McCleskey. The story is now well known. Armed with data

 Professor, Department of Sociology and Institute of Behavio ral Sciences, University of

Colorado-Boulder.

1. That inmate was John Spenkelink, executed May 25, 1979. Wayne King, Florida

Executes Killer as Plea Fails; Spenkelink, Electrocuted, Is First To Die Since Gilmore in 1977, N.Y. TIMES

(May 26, 1979), http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0814FE3E5D12728DDDA

F0A94DD405B898BF1D3.