Administration Of Death Penalty Research Articles

MCCLESKEY ACCUSED Justice Powell and The Moral Price of Institutional Pride

<i>MCCLESKEY</i> ACCUSED Justice Powell and The Moral Price of Institutional Pride

Contradictions in Judicial Support for Capital Punishment in India and Bangladesh: Utilitarian Rationales

India and Bangladesh share a common history, and each has developed somewhat similarly since partition. However, while both countries now have relatively low murder rates, India has seen a decline in the rate of executions, while Bangladesh continues to impose death sentences and carry out executions at a higher rate. There have been challenges to the death penalty in India, restricting its use to exceptional cases. The same has not occurred in Bangladesh. Yet in both countries, systemic flaws in the criminal process are evident. This article draws on two original empirical research projects that explored judges’ opinions on the retention and administration of capital punishment in India and Bangladesh. The data expose justice systems marred by corruption, incompetence, abuses of due process, and arbitrary and inconsistent treatment of defendants from arrest through to conviction and sentencing. It shows that those with the power to sentence to death have little faith in the integrity of the criminal process. Yet, a startling paradox emerges from these studies; despite personal knowledge of its flaws, judges have trust in the death penalty to deter crime and to realise other sentencing aims and feel retention benefits society. This is explained by reference to utilitarian values. Not only did our judges express strongly utilitarian justifications for sentencing people to death, in terms of their erroneous belief in its deterrent effect, but some also articulated utilitarian justifications for misconduct in pre-trial processes, suggesting that it was necessary to break the rules to secure convictions when the system was dysfunctional and ineffective.

Retention and Reform in Japanese Capital Punishment

This Article focuses on the failure of abolition and of death penalty reform in Japan in order to illustrate contingencies in the trajectory of capital punishment in the modern world. Part I describes three facts about postwar Japan that help explain why it retains capital punishment today: a missed opportunity for abolition during the American occupation of the country after World War II; the long-term rule of a conservative political party; and economic and geopolitical power that has enabled the country to resist the influence of international norms. Part II describes a few ways in which Japanese capital punishment has changed in recent years— and many ways in which it has not. Part III focuses on four causes of continuity in capital punishment in Japan: the rarity of exonerations in Japanese criminal justice; a jurisprudence that does not treat death as a special form of criminal punishment requiring extra safeguards for criminal defendants in capital cases; a high degree of secrecy surrounding executions and capital sentencing; and a society in which race is not regarded as a salient factor in the administration of capital punishment. Part IV suggests how reform in Japanese capital punishment might be accomplished by challenging some of the causes of continuity. Part V concludes by observing that the road to death penalty reform is not merely a positive path requiring leadership from the front in the face of public support for the institution. It is also a negative path leading away from beliefs and practices that present obstacles to the institution’s diminution and abrogation.

Statistics and Death: The Conspicuous Role of Race Bias in the Administration of Death Penalty

Statistics and Death: The Conspicuous Role of Race Bias in the Administration of Death Penalty

Christianity and Opposition to the Death Penalty: Late Modern Shifts

AbstractThis article sketches the shifts in Christian thought and denominations on capital punishment from the early church to today in the United States, and then examines the ethical issues in the administration of capital punishment both before and since the Supreme Count stopped executions in 1972. The conclusion of the article is that overwhelming evidence of the injustice of death sentences could not sway popular support for capital punishment, but evidence that switching to life sentences could save states millions of dollars is swaying many pro‐death penalty voters and legislators.

Exploring the Role of Victim Sex, Victim Conduct, and Victim–Defendant Relationship in Capital Punishment Sentencing

Disparities in the administration of capital punishment are a prominent social and political issue. Recent studies indicate that victim characteristics of sex and race produce interactive effects on capital-sentencing outcomes. Extending this line of research, the current analysis explores the intersection of victim sex with victim conduct and victim–defendant relationship, utilizing a population of North Carolina capital cases spanning the years 1977 to 2009 ( N = 1,285). Findings indicate that cases with a female victim who was not involved in illegal activity at the time of the murder and acquaintance female victim cases are most likely to result in a death recommendation. Potential reasons for these findings are discussed.

Disentangling Victim Gender and Capital Punishment

For decades, scholars have documented disparities in the administration of capital punishment. Yet explanations remain largely elusive. One area in which the shift from documentation to explanation has occurred is victim gender. Williams, Demuth, and Holcomb (2007) demonstrate that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed on behalf of women and girls because such victims are more apt to be sexually degraded. We ask the next logical question: Why does sexual degradation lead to the ultimate state sanction? Is it simply because such cases are so horrific? Or are more subtle causal mechanisms at play? Our findings indicate that the relationship between sexual degradation and the District Attorney’s decision to seek the death penalty is fully explained by media coverage. The role of the media suggests that scholars who hope to explain disparities in capital punishment must consider the interplay between case attributes and broader social institutions.

The Social Geometry of Death: Social Structure and Capital Punishment in Georgia, 1993-2000

The Social Geometry of Death: Social Structure and Capital Punishment in Georgia, 1993 -2000 By Sherod Thaxton In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its four year moratorium on executions after deciding the modified death penalty statutes introduced by Florida, Georgia, and Texas contained constitutionally acceptable safeguards to significantly reduce the rampant arbitrariness, capriciousness, and bias that previously plagued the capital punishment process in America. Nonetheless, empirical studies at both the state and federal levels conducted since the death penalty was reinstated have consistently discovered that the administration of capital punishment remains both highly inconsistent and discriminatory. Not only do researchers continue to find that the death penalty is not exclusively reserved for the most heinous murder cases, but also that race/ethnicity, gender, and geography significantly influence the likelihood that a defendant is charged with a capital offense and receives the death penalty. These studies have resulted in considerable debate among legal scholars as to why three decades of procedural reforms to the capital punishment process have failed to satisfactorily reduce the very problems that initially led the Court to invalidate existing death penalty statutes. In a departure from most death penalty analysts, this project argues that previous attempts to reform the capital punishment system have been largely unsuccessful because they do not adequately identify and explain the complex ways in which legally legitimate and illegitimate factors impact legal decision-making. Drawing heavily from the socio-legal and social control literatures, this study advances a theory of legal behavior operating solely at the sociological level to explain capital charging-and-sentencing patterns and tests hypotheses derived from the theory using recent death penalty data from Georgia.

Race and the decision making of juries

The relationship between race and jury decision making is a controversial topic that has received increased attention in recent years. While public and media discourse has focused on anecdotal evidence in the form of high‐profile cases, legal researchers have considered a wide range of empirical questions including: To what extent does the race of a defendant affect the verdict tendencies of juries? Is this influence of race comparable for jurors of different races? In what ways does a jury's racial composition affect its verdict and deliberations? The present review examines both experimental and archival investigations of these issues. Though the extant literature is not always consistent and has devoted too little attention to the psychological mechanisms underlying the influence of race, this body of research clearly demonstrates that race has the potential to impact trial outcomes. This is a conclusion with important practical as well as theoretical implications when it comes to ongoing debates regarding jury representativeness, how to optimize jury performance, jury nullification and racial disparities in the administration of capital punishment.

Arbitrary condemnation and sanctioned violence in shirley jackson’s “the lottery”

This article will discuss current issues surrounding the administration of capital punishment in the U.S. with insights from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. The story itself shows the atavistic nature lurking beneath humankind’s civilized surface and leads the reader to examine such notions as scapegoating, ritual cleansing, gender, class structure, arbitrary condemnation, and sanctioned violence. There may be more truth in Jackson’s short story than the reader cares to confront. This opens the possibility that fiction can give us more insight into value issues than other sources can. Although fiction is made up of imaginary elements, it is true to reality and human experience. The legal historical reality of capital punishment and its subsequent implementation as it has existed and still exists in our culture purports to establish and maintain what amounts to a legal fiction of its own. In this story, Jackson presents us with a glimpse into humankind’s past and brings the reader to question the justification and use of capital punishment in our culture.

Father Knows Best: Parishes, Priests, and American Catholic Parishioners' Attitudes Toward Capital Punishment

Public opinion has important implications for capital punishment in the United States. Such opinion formation involves moral judgments irreducible to processing information on the administration of capital punishment or sentencing alternatives. Religious communities play a crucial role in resolving such moral dilemmas and giving meaning to available information. The Catholic Church strongly opposes capital punishment and strives to instruct lay Catholics on this issue. Accordingly, church attendance is associated with less support of the death penalty among Catholics but not among non‐Catholics in the general population. Politically and socially conservative Catholic parishioners are more supportive of such punishment, while more religious parishioners report less such support. Parish priests significantly influence death penalty attitudes, in particular among more spiritual parishioners. Black Catholics are more supportive of the death penalty than their non‐Catholic counterparts, in part because of a convergence in death penalty attitudes between blacks and whites in predominantly black parishes.

The Execution of the Innocent

In February 1997, the (usually conservative) House of Delegates of the American Bar Association (ABA) overwhelmingly adopted a report from its section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities and went on record as being formally opposed to America's current system of capital jurisprudence, calling for an immediate moratorium on executions.2 The motion was supported by twenty former presidents of the ABA (some who counted themselves as supporters of the death penalty), and passed in the House of Delegates by a twothirds margin. Among the issues of concern to the ABA were the lack of competent counsel in death penalty cases, restricted access to appellate courts even when new evidence of innocence is present, and racial disparities in the administration of capital punishment.3 In this article, we focus on one of the problems that gave rise to the ABA resolution: the continuing and regular incidence of American trial courts sentencing innocent defendants to death. Elsewhere, we have published accounts of more than four hundred cases where persons were wrongfully convicted in capital (or potentially capital) cases and described several dozen of these cases in detail.4 Our discussion in this article falls into three parts. First, we explore the conceptualization of the term innocence. (Without a precise concept, we have no suitable criterion for deciding who should and should not be considered innocent despite a crimi-

The Death Penalty: A 25-Year Retrospective and a Perspective on the Future

Death penalty law has been transformed dramatically over the last 25 years. By some measures, judicial and legislative initiatives have produced substantial improvements in the administration of capital punishment. By other accounts, changes in death penalty laws have been sorely inadequate to remedy basic defects in capital punishment systems. This article reviews the development of death penalty law over the past quarter century. It focuses on the substantive and procedural changes that have occurred in capital punishment jurisprudence since the Supreme Court decided McGautha v. California (1971). After reviewing the watershed rulings of the early and middle 1970s, including Funnan v. Georgia (1972), Gregg v. Georgia (1976), and Woodson v. North Carolina (1976), it discusses case law and legislation that have given shape to present death penalty legal doctrine. Because the major substantive legal battles over capital punishment in this country have been resolved, at least for the foreseeable future, the article identifies several procedural principles that must be recognized if death penalty systems are to have a claim to legitimacy in the future.

Ethics and psychiatry

Two controversial ethical issues are reviewed: the growing public and professional interest in the repercussions of sexual abuse, and the continuing enmeshment of forensic psychiatry in the administration of capital punishment. Both of these topics have polarized the field by the intensity of diverging opinions, and no entirely satisfactory resolution for either is in view.

A Different Agenda: The Supreme Court, Empirical Research Evidence, and Capital Punishment Decisions, 1986–1989

This article examines the Supreme Court's use of social science research evidence in 28 capital punishment cases decided between 1986 and 1989. The study describes the frequency and major correlates of the justices' citation of social science authorities in the 1986–89 sequence of cases. Social science evidence figured significantly in several death penalty cases, although a majority of the justices were more eager to discredit and discount research conclusions than to use them as premises for their decisions, and prevailing case opinions generally promoted principles that had little to do with empirical evidence concerning the administration of capital punishment. Social science citation patterns in majority and dissenting opinions, and in the opinions of “liberal” and “conservative” Supreme Court justices, in significant respects parallel the Court's shifting doctrinal premises in capital punishment decisions.