Number Of Death Sentences Research Articles

Die Verzeichnisse der k.u.k. militärgerichtlichen Standrechtsurteile – ein Sensationsfund? Überlegungen zur Zahl der militärgerichtlichen Exekutionen in der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee im 1. Weltkrieg und die Thesen Hans Hautmanns

In contrast to the British, French, Italian and German military jurisdiction, the number of death sentences („Standrechtsurteile“, summary judgments) imposed or carried out by Austro- Hungarian courts martial in the First World War is unknown. Official statistics with data on the death sentences of the Field General Courts Martial were found in the Austrian Military Court Archive recently. The present work will show that the numbers recorded in these statistics are valid and, using existing regional statistical evaluations of files of the Military Court Archive, extrapolate these data to the overall military death sentences carried out by the Austo-Hungarian military jurisdiction. This extrapolation gives a plausible result compared to the known figures for Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany.

Survivors of Witch Trials and the Quest for Justice in Early Modern Germany

This article explores the trauma that early modern witchcraft trials inflicted on survivors and their communities. The point of departure is the case of Margareth Los, a widow accused of witchcraft in 1520s Württemberg. Subjected to brutal torture, Los was acquitted provisionally after three years in jail. Remarkably, she had the strength to produce an account of her ordeal and to bring her case before the highest court of justice in the Empire. The historical literature on witch trials has long been polarized by the quest for the most “accurate” death tolls. However, the social cost of witch hunts cannot be assessed by the number of death sentences alone. As Los’s case illustrates, witch hunts often had inconclusive outcomes, leaving the accused in a legal limbo that could last for years or even decades. Only one outcome was always the same: witch trials left behind a population of uprooted, dispossessed, and traumatized individuals.

Overkill? An Examination of Comparatively Excessive Death Sentences in North Carolina, 1990–2010

This study examines death/life capital sentences in one southern state, North Carolina, during the period 1990 to 2010 to determine the extent to which they are comparatively excessive/lenient. The study employs data derived from a variety of official sources on the population of capital trials in the state during this timeframe and follows the analytic techniques developed by David Baldus and his colleagues and by Paternoster and Kazyaka in their studies of comparative excessiveness in capital sentencing in California, Georgia, and South Carolina, respectively. The results show a substantial number of death sentences that meet the standard for excessiveness, but the data also show a nearly equal number of life sentences that may be deemed too lenient. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Potential Savings from Abolition of the Death Penalty in North Carolina

Despite the long-term decline in the number of death sentences and the lack of executions, the cost of the death penalty in North Carolina remains high. To document this cost, the empirical analysis here focuses on a recent two-year period, comparing actual costs associated with capital proceedings, with likely costs in the absence of the death penalty. The conclusion: the state would have spent almost $11 million less each year on criminal justice activities (including appeals and imprisonment) if the death penalty had been abolished. Additional criminal justice resources would have been freed up and available to be redirected to other cases.

An Overdose of Dangerousness: How 'Future Dangerousness' Captures the Least Culpable Capital Defendants and Undermines the Rationale for the Executions It Supports

“Future dangerousness” is a very non-technical name for a particularly problematic capital sentencing factor used in nearly every capital jurisdiction in the United States, directly underlying at least half of all modern era executions and likely playing some role in the rest. Despite its popularity, the American Psychiatric Association has maintained for over twenty years that such predictions of future threat are “wrong in at least two out of every three cases.” Thus, while an inquiry into a defendant’s future dangerousness seems to align with a Supreme-Court-approved purpose of capital punishment (“the incapacitation of dangerous criminals and the consequent prevention of crimes that they may otherwise commit in the future”), in application the incapacitation rationale is severely undermined by alarmingly unreliable predictions of future threat. Of even graver concern should be the effect of future dangerousness to obscure any culpability determination, resulting in a high number of death sentences for vulnerable defendants most people would never consider “deserving of execution,” and undercutting another common rationale for capital punishment: retribution.This should cause us all to pause and, as Justice Stevens recently urged in Baze v. Rees, to question our retention of a system that is “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process that weighs the costs and risks of administering that penalty against its identifiable benefits[.]” This article broadly examines future dangerousness’ flawed application and unique ability to distort the constitutional function of capital sentencing hearings, replacing a juror’s duty to consider individual culpability with a fear of responsibility for future violence. It concludes that, while comprehensive reforms might minimize its unsettling and unconstitutional implications, current use of future dangerousness is leading to unnecessary and unconstitutional executions lacking both incapacitation and retributive rationales.

The Death Penalty in Delaware: An Empirical Study

This article reports the findings of the first phase of a three phase empirical study of the death penalty in Delaware. In phase 1, we examined only cases in which the defendant was sentenced to death. While our findings are preliminary, there appear to be, as numerous other studies have found in other jurisdictions, race of victim effects. Seventy percent of the death sentences were imposed in white victim cases, even though the majority of the murder victims are black. Additionally, Delaware has one of the highest death sentencing rates in the country. This high rate appears to be the result of a change in the Delaware death sentencing scheme from jury to judge sentencing. When that change was implemented, the number of death sentences rose dramatically. Our preliminary findings also reveal a geographic effect. Two thirds of the death sentences were imposed in New Castle County, 29% were imposed in Kent County and only 5% of the death sentences resulted from murders which occurred in Sussex County. Finally, in analyzing the outcomes of the cases in which the defendant was sentenced to death on appeal, we found an overall error rate of 44%.

Societal threat, authoritarianism, conservatism, and U.S. state death penalty sentencing (1977-2004).

On the basis of K. Stenner's (2005) authoritarian dynamic theory, it was hypothesized that the number of death sentences and executions would be higher in more threatened conservative states than in less threatened conservative states, and would be lower in more threatened liberal states than in less threatened liberal states. Threat was based on state homicide rate, violent crime rate, and non-White percentage of population. Conservatism was based on state voter ideological identification, Democratic and Republican Party elite liberalism-conservatism, policy liberalism-conservatism, religious fundamentalism, degree of economic freedom, and 2004 presidential election results. For 1977-2004, with controls for state population and years with a death penalty provision, the interactive hypothesis received consistent support using the state conservatism composite and voter ideological identification alone. As well, state conservatism was related to death penalties and executions, but state threat was not. The temporal stability of the findings was demonstrated with a split-half internal replication using the periods 1977-1990 and 1991-2004. The interactive hypothesis and the results also are discussed in the context of other threat-authoritarianism theories and terror management theory.

The Death Penalty Abroad

Up to approximately the First World War, the issues involved in the controversy over the death penalty were relatively clear and simple. On one side there was the camp of the abolitionists. They were the humanitarians, the liberals, the progressives. Their movement, started in its contemporary form by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, was intrinsically connected with the development of the ideologies of the western society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their argument ran along very clear-cut lines: capital punishment is below human dignity, functionally it does not do enough good to justify itself, and it leads to evil consequences. Opposing the abolitionists were the conservatives, the old-fashioned, the less-educated people, who either did not worry about the executions of criminals or even felt that these were indispensable to keep the human race in line. Now the abolitionists, now the conservatives, had the upper hand; but on the whole, the abolitionists seem to have better expressed the spirit of the epoch, and step by step the number of capital offenses listed in the criminal codes, the number of death sentences imposed by the courts, and the number of executions actually performed steadily diminished in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue of capital punishment for so-called political offenses was also quite clear. Except for some debatable borderline cases, the distinction between a criminal act and a political offense was pretty well established and generally agreed upon. The abolitionists attempted, of course, to expand also into the area of political offenses, but although they were in all probability responsible here too for some decrease in executions, they found the governmental tendency to exterminate the opponents of its political power an especially tough nut to crack. As a result, the abolitionists concentrated on the ordinary crimes and partly closed their eyes to political executions, which, by the way, were not very frequent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries except for the outburst of the French Revolution. The abolitionists had a hard time also with offenses within the military machine of the state and offenses in wartime. Here, as in the case of the political offenses, they met with the hard fact that the military simply would not give up the death penalty, usually arguing that, since the military personnel is professionally exposed to the threat of death, no effective control is possible without a like threat. Likewise, in time of war, when martial law was introduced, the threat to the very existence of the state and the lives of its people was successfully employed 137