Capital Trials Research Articles

Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

Reviewed by: Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate Ramona Caponegro (bio) Abate, Michelle Ann. Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. If Americans are obsessed with violence, we are also fixated on puzzling out the roots, the cultural representations, and the effects of our nation’s bloody obsession. In her most recent book, Michelle Ann Abate examines how homicide, one of the most horrific acts of violence, “has formed a beguiling subject and recurring theme in narratives popular with American youth for centuries” (10). Employing an interdisciplinary framework, Abate positions children’s books involving murders within the legal and sociocultural history [End Page 349] of the United States and within a media culture in which killings and other depictions of violence can be readily found in books, films, television shows, video games, news programs, and even “murderabilia.” Arguing that literary works for children previously have been excluded from cultural analyses of homicide in the United States, Abate aptly corrects this oversight, offering detailed readings of seven well-known stories for children and young adults in order to link the lethal violence in children’s literature to historical events and figures, as well as to different understandings and attitudes about murder. Abate observes, “Far from existing outside of or even separate from the history of homicide, popular American children’s literature is both influenced by it and exerts an influence on it” (25). Several of the featured children’s books address issues related directly to homicide and relevant investigatory policies and trial procedures. For example, Abate’s analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) relates the British antigallows movement that emerged during Lewis Carroll’s lifetime to his satirical portrayal of the two capital trials of the Mouse and the Knave of Hearts in the novel. Similarly, Abate draws connections between the conclusions of early criminal anthropologists, most notably Cesare Lombroso, and the physical descriptions that Edgar Rice Burroughs provides of murderers in Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Discussing Tarzan’s homicidal characters, Abate argues that “their similarities to the Italian researcher’s portrait of the ‘born criminal’ are too numerous to be merely coincidental” (105). Burroughs’s description of Tarzan’s “finely formed features, well-proportioned face, and good-looking appearance” (113) absolves him of being Lombroso’s “criminal type,” despite the numerous murders that he commits throughout the book. Just as Abate situates Tarzan within the developing field of criminal anthropology, she also locates Nancy Drew and her “famous hunches, her powerful sense of intuition, and her unfailingly accurate gut feelings” (120) within the arena of parapsychology, comparing Nancy and Eugenie Dennis, a real-life psychic from the 1920s and 1930s, and showing ways in which Nancy uses her psychic ability to prevent murders and to solve other crimes. Yet children’s books about homicide and attempted homicide deal not only with crimes and related legal policies and applied theories. They also reflect changing cultural beliefs about murder and evolving representations of murderers in different genres. According to Abate, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) preserves the legacy of the paperback pulp novels of the 1930s through the 1960s, particularly the accounts of juvenile delinquency, for an intended readership of young adults. Likewise, Abate demonstrates how Walter Dean Myers’s Monster (1999) combines the motivations and intentions of colonial-era execution sermons and more contemporary, sensationalized murder literature to introduce a sympathetic protagonist who may have been [End Page 350] involved in a horribly violent, graphically narrated murder. In her chapter on Monster, Abate reveals a changing cultural perception of murderers as individuals who are repellant rather than pitiable, whereas in her chapter on “Snow White,” the most psychoanalytic chapter of the book, she examines a longstanding need for parents to submerge their homicidal feelings for their offspring rather than expressing them openly. Finally, through a discussion of the killings of zombies in Stacey Jay’s My So-Called Death (2010), Abate speculates about the possible future of murder and the relevant social and legal ramifications if the United States indeed moves into a posthuman and perhaps “posthomicide” era. Though Abate references homicides...

The effects of mortality salience and evidence strength on death penalty sentencing decisions

The nature of capital cases necessarily makes mortality a highly salient factor in the courtroom. Terror management theory research has previously explored mortality salience effects on behavior in a variety of contexts, including legal judgments. We sought to extend this line of research by directly examining mortality salience effects in the context of capital trials. In Study 1, mock jurors who had been specifically asked to contemplate their own mortality and exposed to trial-related death references (Dual-Focused Mortality [DFM]) were more likely to appropriately weigh evidence regarding defendant future dangerousness than participants only exposed to trial-related death references (Trial-Focused Mortality [TFM]). In Study 2, we manipulated mitigating factor strength using a different capital sentencing scenario. Consistent with the results of Study 1, DFM participants were more likely to appropriately utilize mitigating evidence than TFM participants, particularly when they had more complete comprehension of relevant legal concepts.

Murder stories: ideological narratives in capital punishment

Prologue Chapter 1: Capital Punishment Conflicts, Narrativity, Hegemony, and Resistance Chapter 2: The American Creed and American Capital Punishment Chapter 3: Death Especially Deregulated Chapter 4: The American Creed in Prosecutor and Defender Narratives Chapter 5: Forgetting the Future: Cause Lawyering and the Work of California Capital Trial Defenders Chapter 6: Facts and Furies: The Antinomies of Facts, Law, and Retribution in the Work of Capital Prosecutors Epilogue

The Angry Juror: Sentencing Decisions in First‐Degree Murder

SummaryA great deal of research in legal decision making has overlooked the influence of affect on the decision‐making process. The present study measured the fluctuation of emotions across five time points of a capital trial and tested the overall relationship between changes in emotion and sentencing decisions. The results showed that across all participants, anger initially increased and then decreased during the course of a capital punishment trial. Most importantly, the more individual mock jurors' anger increased during any stage of the trial, the more likely they were to assign a death sentence. Furthermore, when jurors' anger increased, they rated mitigating factors presented by the defense as weaker and the weaker mitigation mediated the relationship between change in anger and sentencing. The paper ends with a discussion of theoretical explanations and policy implications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Capital Pretrial Publicity as a Symbolic Public Execution: A Case Report

Data were collected from 444 community members before two high-profile capital trials in the 12th Judicial Circuit of Florida. Results revealed that participants characterized the defendant in dehumanizing terms. Findings also demonstrated that self-reported familiarity with the case was not related to recognition and recall accuracy of case-specific details. In addition, the data showed the presence of source monitoring errors in jurors' recollections of case-specific facts. Finally, the analyses indicated that level of support for the death penalty and death-qualification status were significantly related to community members' recollection of case-specific facts and susceptibility to pretrial publicity.

The Deadly Paradox of Capital Jurors

We examine support for the death penalty among a unique group of respondents: one hundred and eighty-seven citizens who actually served as jurors on capital trials in South Carolina. Capital jurors support the death penalty as much as, if not more than, members of the general public. Yet capital jurors, like poll respondents, harbor doubts about the penalty's fairness. Moreover, jurors?black jurors and Southern Baptists in particular?are ready to abandon their support for the death penalty when the alternative to death is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, especially when combined with a requirement of restitution. Support for the death penalty therefore exists side by side with doubts about its fairness and a distinct preference for some alternative to it. What explains this deadly paradox? We suggest that the paradox arises where democratic politics fails to make life imprisonment without parole one of the alternatives to death, or where public education fails to inform or persuade jurors that capital defendants sentenced to life imprisonment will really remain in prison for the rest of their lives.

Effects of Neuroimaging Evidence on Mock Juror Decision Making

During the penalty phase of capital trials, defendants may introduce mitigating evidence that argues for a punishment "less than death." In the past few years, a novel form of mitigating evidence-brain scans made possible by technological advances in neuroscience-has been proffered by defendants to support claims that brain abnormalities reduce their culpability. This exploratory study assessed the impact of neuroscience evidence on mock jurors' sentencing recommendations and impressions of a capital defendant. Using actual case facts, we manipulated diagnostic evidence presented by the defense (psychosis diagnosis; diagnosis and neuropsychological test results; or diagnosis, test results, and neuroimages) and future dangerousness evidence presented by the prosecution (low or high risk). Recommendations for death sentences were affected by the neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence: defendants deemed at high risk for future dangerousness were less likely to be sentenced to death when jurors had this evidence than when they did not. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence also had mitigating effects on impressions of the defendant. We describe study limitations and pose questions for further research.

Carbon Capital's Trial, the Kyoto Protocol's Demise, and Openings for Climate Justice

This volume is devoted to exploring two interlocking, overlapping scales of political ecology: local eco-social conditions and environmental justice campaigning in Durban, South Africa and climate ...

Citizenship and punishment: Situating death penalty jury sentencing

Although capital punishment in the United States is subject to much social scientific scrutiny, there has been little ethnographic study of death penalty trials. This is not only an empirical lacuna, but also a theoretically and politically important one: by failing to take capital trials as primary objects of inquiry, the practices of lawyers, witnesses, judges, and others are viewed as products of, rather than implicated in, the institution of criminal justice. Based on an ethnography of fifteen death penalty sentencing trials across the United States during 2007, 2008, and 2009, this article seeks to understand the role of juries in capital trials. While judges customarily make sentencing decisions in American criminal cases, capital cases require jury sentencing. Key to understanding this unusual requirement is the recruitment of potential jurors into a role I term punitive citizenship. Through the process of choosing ‘death qualified’ jurors for trial, capital jurors are asked to call upon their own moral positions in conjunction with their responsibility to the collective to decide on appropriate punishments for defendants who are singled out for capital prosecution by the state. This ensures that capital jurors take personal responsibility for the punishment decision. The article argues that this process blurs the lines between state and citizen action, solidifies the types of homicides that are designated worthy of capital punishment, and allows the state to neutralize some of the historic problems with state-sponsored death sentences.

Does Racism Fuel Conviction Proneness Among Non–African Americans? Assessing the Impact of Juror Bias at the Conviction Stage of Capital Trials

Previous theory has attempted to explain the disproportionate application of death sentences to African American defendants. It has been argued that racial prejudice directly and indirectly influences attitudes toward capital punishment, and this ultimately impacts conviction proneness, a tendency to favor conviction over acquittal among capital jurors. In the current research, the 1990 and 1996 General Social Survey are used in a series of multiple and logistic regression equations in an effort to extend this theoretical framework by applying it to non–African American respondents who favor capital punishment (N = 372). Although age, low education level, and conservatism influence racial prejudice among non–African American death penalty supporters, the findings suggest that racial bias is not a significant predictor of conviction proneness either directly or indirectly. Implications for the theory are discussed.

Effects of Mortality Salience on Capital Punishment Sentencing Decisions

Despite the empirical success of Terror Management Theory (TMT) and the possibility that capital jurors may be unable to escape mortality salience effects, no studies have applied TMT to capital punishment trials. This research asked mock jurors to focus on their own death, the victim's death, or the defendant's death while reviewing a capital trial. Mock jurors who focused on the victim's or defendant's death (but not their own death) relied more on their attitudes toward the death penalty to make sentencing decisions than did other participants. These results raise questions about the usefulness of TMT in understanding capital jury decision making.

Testifying About Mitigation: When Social Workers and Other Mental Health Professionals Face Aggressive Cross-Examination

Aggressive cross-examinations can be challenging and difficult for social workers and other mental health professionals who testify in court as expert witnesses. Although several sources of guidance for expert witnesses are available, responses to cross-examination can be understood especially clearly in case-specific contexts. This article describes the nature of mitigation assessments and presents cross-examination of a social worker offering psychosocial mitigation testimony in the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial. The cross-examination questions and answers are discussed in several categories, including challenges to objectivity, challenges to thoroughness and competence, challenges to validity, and differing findings by another expert. Each set of questions and answers is accompanied by interpretative comments about how to cope with the specific cross-examination strategies.

The Future of Capital Trials: An Exploration of Procedural Justice, Race, and Willingness to Serve Again

The purpose of this article is to determine whether race (a juror’s race, racial composition of the jury, race of the jury foreperson, and defendant—victim racial composition) and perceptions of procedural justice affect capital jurors’ willingness to serve again. Using logistic regression, data from 662 capital jurors are analyzed. A direct test of procedural justice theory is not supported by these findings; however, feeling emotionally upset about the experience is strongly associated with unwillingness to serve again. In addition, those who served on a White defendant—Black victim case were more likely to report future willingness to serve compared to jurors on White— White cases. When the regression model is divided into subsamples (White jurors only and Black jurors only), feeling emotionally upset is still a strong indicator for both groups, and both Black and White jurors are less willing to serve again when the victim in their case was White. In addition, part-time employment was a significant indicator of unwillingness to serve again for Black jurors. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Stabilizing violence

Narratives matter. They shape the social world in which they circulate, reflecting and refracting the cultural limits of what narratives can be told, in what setting, to whom. From this perspective, they structure how we make sense of ourselves, as members of a community, but they also structure how we understand right and wrong, good and evil. Nowhere is this more apparent than in capital murder trials in which the narratives that are constructed are literally life and death matters. The research on narrative processes in capital trials documents how the courtroom is a place for “story-battles” where each narrative works to disqualify the other and legitimize itself, in an effort to structure jurors’ decisions. This is accentuated in the penalty phase of the capital trial where both mitigating and aggravating narratives “thicken” the narratives told in the guilt phase; in the penalty phase jurors make the decision to sentence the defendant to either life without the possibility of parole, or to death. While some research of juror decision-making shows that jurors favor the prosecution narrative and make up their minds to give the death sentence independent of the penalty phase narratives, other research on mitigation narratives shows that contextualizing the defendant, via mitigating narratives, can overturn the power of the prosecution narrative and lead to a life, rather than a death, sentence. This research seeks to avoid efforts to associate juror cognitive processes to narrative processes and instead seeks to examine the connection between jury sentencing decisions, for life or death, as a function of narrative closure which is, in turn, defined in terms of two narrative dimensions: structural complexity and moral transparency. Using this framework, the penalty phase narratives in two capital trials are compared along these dimensions; the findings suggest that moral transparency and structural complexity provide the foundations for narrative closure in the penalty phase, as both structural simplicity and moral obtuseness are characteristic of narratives that are not adopted by the jury. While the sample size is small, the narrative data is rich, and the study, overall, is intended not to suggest a causal relation between dimensions of narrative closure and jury sentencing, but rather aims to illustrate a method for assessing narratives in relation to jury sentencing in the penalty phase of capital trials. However, at the broadest level, the paper offers a framework for examining the way that narrative works to contain violence.

“The extreme penalty of the law”: mercy and the death penalty as aspects of state power in colonial Nyasaland, c. 1903–47

Capital punishment was the pinnacle of the colonial judicial system and its use of state violence, but has previously been neglected as a topic of historical research in Africa. This article is based on the case files and legal records of over 800 capital trials – predominantly for murder – dating between 1900 and 1947. It outlines the functioning of the legal system in Nyasaland and the tensions between “violence” and “humanitarianism” in the use and reform of the death penalty. Capital punishment was a political penalty as much as a judicial punishment, with both didactic and deterrent functions: it operated through mercy and the sparing of condemned lives as well as through executions. Mercy in Nyasaland was consistent with colonial political objectives and cultural values: it was decided not only on the facts of cases, but according to British conceptions of “justice”, “order”, “criminality”, and “African” behaviour. This article analyses the use of mercy in Nyasaland to provide a lens on the nature of colonial governance, and the tensions between African and colonial understandings of violence.

Forgetting the future

This article aims to push the boundaries of definitions of capital cause lawyering to include a more potentially radical ‘cause’ that takes on one key ideological underpinning of state killing: individualism. This article studies whether and how capital trial lawyers take up a ‘radical’ cause by challenging individualism. To the extent that they oppose state killing and illuminate social inequality, the defenders studied in this project engage in something beyond the parameters of their particular trials, and thus fall partially within current definitions of cause lawyering. However, considering that they are unaware of, avoid, or suppress subversive arguments within the expansive discursive space afforded by penalty phase proceedings, they may be ‘forgetting the future’ precisely so that their clients may avoid a death sentence. Rather, defenders construct narratives that portray a liminal conceptualization of the influence of social forces on human free will, a concept known in the defense bar as ‘diminished autonomy’.

Frontloading Mitigation: The “Legal” and the “Human” in Death Penalty Defense

The bifurcation of capital trials into determinations of guilt and sentencing presents defense advocates with what seem to be two distinct domains of knowledge—one apparently “legal” in character, the other “human.” But this epistemological division is actually not so clear in practice. This article dissects the procedural and strategic mechanisms through which these two domains unsettle and reconstitute the other. I provide a historical, empirically grounded account that explicitly articulates the connections between developments in legal procedure, prevailing standards of care concerning the need to conduct humanistic investigations of mitigating factors, and the on‐the‐ground trial practice of “frontloading” as a defense strategy. Drawing from documentary research, interview data with leading capital defense practitioners, and analytical observations based on my own experience as a mitigation specialist, this article presents itself as a case study of the processes of mutually constitutive rupturing that reconfigure the categories of the legal and the human.

Handling Capital Cases Dealing with the Media

Perhaps all that needs to be said on the issue of media and trials is People v. O.J. Simpson. The lessons of that trial are obvious. The trial judge is directly and personally responsible for maintaining the dignity and decorum of the courtroom proceedings. The media's interests do not involve issues of fair trial and due process. Rather, the media's interests involve issues of public information, ratings, and financial benefits from coverage of a particular trial. Further, when dealing with media coverage, the attorney should determine how media coverage might affect the resolution of the client's case and how he or she can appropriately deal with a capital case so as to protect the client and the integrity of our system of justice. Also, the trial judge must be aggressively involved in media management to ensure the defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial and the societal right to justice in a properly conducted trial. A review of some of the issues that often arise when dealing with a capital case will help prepare the judiciary for a capital case with intense media focus: 1. What are the legal guidelines in the area of free press and fair trial interests? 2. What are some of the pitfalls of the capital trial and what planning should the justice system take to appropriately address those concerns?

Alcohol and Drug Mitigation in Capital Murder Trials: Implications for Sentencing Decisions

Analyses of the impact on sentencing when alcohol and drug‐related mitigation is used in the sentencing phases of capital murder trials is virtually absent from the existing literature. The present study addresses this by exploring the effect of having mitigation with alcohol and drug themes accepted in a large sample (n = 804) of capital murder trials in North Carolina. Logistic regression analyses that include a number of relevant control variables reveal no substantive impacts of having alcohol mitigation accepted by capital murder juries, but drug mitigators that were either accepted or rejected by juries were associated with an increased risk of receiving a death sentence. Possible reasons for the results and their implications are discussed and suggestions are made for further study of the effects of alcohol/drug mitigation in capital trials.

Actual innocence: is death different?

Supreme Court jurisprudence relies heavily on the premise that "death is different" from other criminal sanctions, and that capital cases entail commensurately demanding standards of reliability. Although invoked most frequently with respect to sentencing, both precedent and logic suggest that heightened reliability applies as well to guilt determination in capital trials. Nevertheless, recurrent and highly visible wrongful convictions in capital cases have affected public opinion, contributed to a precipitous decline in new death sentences, and led to calls for reforms designed to guard against the risk of executing innocent persons. This article examines the implications of the "death is different" doctrine for the problem of wrongful convictions in both capital and non-capital cases. It argues that innovations designed to enhance reliability in the special context of death-penalty prosecutions are important in their own right, but relevant new safeguards also should extend to criminal cases generally, where innocent people are similarly at risk and wrongful convictions are far more prevalent.