Sarat's When the State Kills and the Transformation of Death Penalty Scholarship

Abstract

A major thrust of sociolegal empirical scholarship on the American death penalty has been concerned with marshaling support for its abolition by documenting the gap between the ideals of constitutional and just punishment and the realities of its implementation. This body of work has examined how contemporary death penalty practices and procedures fall short on any number of considerations relevant to policy: how modem sentencing schemes fail to adequately guide juries to fair and proportionate outcomes, how the juror-screening process in capital cases biases juries, how various decision-making points are influenced by racial characteristics of the defendants and victims, and how society's evolving standards of decency may be offended by the punishment. Thus, much of the research on capital punishment conducted over the past several decades falls squarely into the realm of applied social research, where the hypotheses tested are as much derived from real world impetuses as from basic theoretical considerations. Indeed, the collaboration of academic scholars and lawyers in the challenges to the death penalty that culminated in the 1972 landmark case Furman v. Georgia (408 U.S. 238) stands as one of the most influential and notable of such collaborative efforts in recent history. In the years leading up to Furman, NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys worked side by side with social scientists to mount an empirical case against the constitutionality of capital punishment by documenting its long history of biased and