The Constitution Project is a non-profitthink tank in the United States whose goal is to build bipartisan consensus on significant constitutional and legal questions. Its founder and president is Virginia Sloan. The Constitution Project’s work is divided between two programs: the Rule of Law Program and the Criminal Justice Program. Each program houses bipartisan committees focused on specific constitutional issues.[1]
The Constitution Project, with the Cato Institute, the Center for National Security Studies, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, People for the American Way, and the Rutherford Institute, filed an amicus brief in support of José Padilla.
The Coalition to Defend Checks and Balances is convened to address “the risk of permanent and unchecked presidential power, and the accompanying failure of Congress to exercise its responsibility as a separate and independent branch of government.[4] In addition to publishing its own statements and reports, the Coalition also joins statements and reports issued by other committees.
The statement “condemns certain uses of presidential signing statements and calls for immediate action from both the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government to respond to a ‘constitutional crisis’ that is endangering our system of checks and balances.”[5]
The Criminal Justice Program seeks to counter a broad-based effort to deny fundamental day-in-court rights and due process protections to those accused of crimes.
The Death Penalty Committee of the Criminal Justice Program is co-chaired by Gerald Kogan, former Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, and Beth Wilkinson, a prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case.[6] The Death Penalty Committee is a bipartisan committee of death penalty supporters and opponents who believe that the risk of wrongful executions in the United States is too high. It was formerly known as the National Committee to Prevent Wrongful Executions.[7]
Mandatory Justice – Eighteen Reforms to the Death Penalty
The report “expresses the Committee’s deep concerns with regard to the implementation of the death penalty in the United States, and calls for crucial reforms, including in the areas of effective counsel, racial fairness, and proportionality.”
Mandatory Justice – The Death Penalty Revisited
An update to the committee’s first publication on the topic, the report notes “some improvements in recent years and identifies further steps that must still be taken in order to minimize mistakes and increase fairness and accuracy.”
The Constitution Project is governed by a board of directors. The board is currently chaired by Armando Gomez, a partner at the law firm of Skadden Arps who previously served as an attorney-advisor to the IRS and as chief counsel to the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service.[12] Other members of the board include:
David Beier
Managing director at Bay City Capital LLC and former Chief Domestic Policy Adviser to Vice President Al Gore
Former Republican state legislator, retired Army brigadier general, and former instructor of prisoner-of-war interrogation and military law at the Sixth U.S. Army Intelligence School
^"Think tank plans study of how US treats detainees". The Wall Street Journal. 2010-12-17. Archived from the original on 2010-12-19. Former FBI Director William Sessions, former Arkansas U.S. Rep. Asa Hutchinson, a retired Army general and a retired appeals court judge in Washington are among 11 people selected for a task force that will meet for the first time in early January, said Virginia Sloan, a lawyer and president of The Constitution Project.