“We’re All Born with Equal Opportunities”: Hegemonic Individualism and Contextual Mitigation among Delaware Capital Jurors

Abstract

The Supreme Court has ruled that evidence derived from a capital defendant’s life history is crucial for making the reasoned moral judgment that is central to the death penalty’s constitutionality. However, Dunn and Kaplan (2009) suggested that individualism is so embedded in American culture that most people defer to it uncritically, which makes the use of such contextualizing mitigating evidence challenging. Prior studies suggest that capital jurors do not understand mitigation and focus on guilt-related issues when making their sentencing decisions, but they do not examine why this is so. This study extends these prior works by comparing the content of penalty trial transcripts to the evidence discussed by 35 former capital jurors from eight trials (four that ended with a life sentence and four that ended with a death sentence) in Delaware. The results indicate that whether they voted for life or death, the jurors based their sentencing decisions primarily on the individualistic guilt-centered question of culpability because they rejected the relevance of contextualizing life history evidence, thus supporting and extending Dunn and Kaplan’s (2009) theory. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.