Capital Punishment Process Research Articles

Life or Death: Using a Real-World Case to Assess Student Death Penalty Opinion

A significant body of scholarship addresses Justice Thurgood Marshall’s hypothesis regarding the nature of death penalty public opinion. However, much of this research is based on hypothetical scenarios or general classroom experiences versus real-world examples of the capital punishment process. The present study evaluates the power of the Marshall Hypothesis through a classroom exercise where students are exposed to the trial and punishment transcripts of a real death penalty case. Using a student sample from universities in Texas and California, the present study investigates how exposure to such information not only creates a unique learning experience for students and opportunities for faculty collaboration in the classroom, but also provides a new way to assess how exposure to information may impact death penalty opinion.

A Review of Sex Disparities in the “Key Players” of the Capital Punishment Process: From Defendants to Jurors

Extralegal disparities between defendants sentenced to the death penalty and those who receive life without parole disturb even the most resolute advocates of capital punishment. Extensive bodies of research document extralegal factors influencing death penalty outcomes. Although studies largely focus on race and ethnicity, a growing body of research considers the impact of sex on the capital sentencing process. This paper reviews the extant research on the impact of the sex of the victim, defendant, attorney, juror, and judge on capital case outcomes. Women’s scarcity on death row and a previously documented “female victim effect” condemning male defendants who kill female victims, particularly for those committing crimes of sexual degradation, suggests that death row policies and their implementation chivalrously protect female defendants and victims. Conversely, a limited amount of research documents a “domestic discount,” or greater leniency for death-eligible crimes commonly victimizing women than for those victimizing acquaintances or strangers. Although opinion polls document greater support for the death penalty among men than women, juror sex inconsistently predicts sentencing outcomes in the literature. Minimal research on judge and attorney sex finds female judges more liberal in death penalty sentencing than male judges and inconclusive relationships between attorney sex and adjudication. Findings in the research on sex and death penalty outcomes support the existence of a “sex effect” and inform recommendations for future research to expand the body of literature.

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.

Breaking Bodies Into Pieces: Time, Torture and Bio-Power

This article is an attempt to comprehend the bureaucratic phenomenon of the deathwatch, the last 24 hours of a prisoner’s life, stressing the theoretical applications scholars can make to the study of docile bodies on death row. Because years of work are necessary to obtain obedience from condemned inmates, health care professionals lend more than an aura of legitimacy to the capital punishment process. As an integral part of the prison and capital punishment, they provide stability, reliability, and the means to achieve the goals of peaceful executions. The ultimate objective of utilizing health care professionals is the sanitization of penal practice and penal language to effect the complete absence of resistance from the condemned.

Killing for the state: the darkest side of American nursing.

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive 'caring' nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of healthcare professionals' skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states' death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states' penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners.

Caring to Death

The aim of this article is to describe the role of health care professionals in the capital punishment process. The relationship between the protocol of capital punishment in the United States and the use of health care professionals to carry out that task has been overlooked in the literature on punishment. Yet for some time, the operation of the medical sciences in prison have been `part of a disciplinary strategy' `intrinsic to the development of power relationships'. Many capital punishment statutes require medical personnel to be present at, if not actively involved in, executions. Through analyses of these statutes, show the degree to which these professionals have become part of the state's executive apparatus.

Prosecutorial discretion in seeking death: An analysis of racial disparity in the pretrial stages of case processing in a midwestern county

In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to foreclose the possibility of challenging racial bias in capital sentencing by using statistically based claims of discrimination. McCleskey, however, does not prevent a challenge to decisions made by particular individuals during the capital punishment process. In this study we examined pretrial decisions made by, or under the direction of, one prosecutor to determine whether those decisions had been influenced by race. We found that homicide cases involving black defendants and white victims fared worse than other racial combinations in all of the pretrial decisions made: They were more likely to result in first-degree murder charges, to be served notice of aggravating circumstances, and to proceed to capital trial.

Capital punishment in Missouri: Examining the issue of racial disparity

AbstractGuided discretion statutes were designed to control arbitrariness and discrimination in capital sentencing. Using data from Supplemental Homicide Reports and Trial Judge Reports, this article examines the issue of racial disparity in Missouri's capital punishment process from 1977 through 1991. Findings from the three decision points examined suggest racial bias against the killers of whites, particularly if the offender is black, and a concomitant devaluation of black victims. The strongest effects noted are in the prosecutor's decision to charge homicide offenders with capital murder and to proceed to penalty trial in convicted capital murder cases. While the effects are not necessarily limited to the least aggravated categories, the effects of race are strongest when prosecutors and jurors are freed from the seriousness of the cases to consider other factors. The racial disparities are also apparent in mid‐range cases up until the sentencing stage. However, disparities occurring earlier in the process are not rectified during sentencing. In fact, in the least aggravated cases, racial disparities are magnified at the sentencing stage.

Assessing and restoring competency to be executed: Should psychiatrists participate?

AbstractFord v. Wainwright (1986) is one among several recent U. S. Supreme Court decisions granting psychiatrists a distinct but awkward role in the capital punishment process. Ford affirms the right of the condemned to be spared execution while mentally incompetent, and validates state laws requiring psychiatric evaluation and treatment of capital inmates who plead that they have become insane while awaiting execution. The ruling raises troublesome questions for psychiatry, including whether it is ethical for psychiatrists to assess or treat prisoners, thereby enabling their execution. This article argues that evaluation and treatment of capital inmates is in accordance with medical practice standards that emphasize respect for patients' autonomy and rationality.

The assessment of competency for execution: An overview

AbstractCompetency for execution is a legal competency that is an integral part of the capital punishment process in the United States. With the rapidly increasing population under death sentence, the issue of competency for execution is likely to be raised with increasing frequency in the coming years. This creates some compelling ethical issues for the mental health professions. The questions of whether mental health professionals should provide assessment of competency for execution and, if so, how the assessment should be performed, are issues of immediate urgency.