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Juries bear the responsibility of whether or not to sentence a defendant to life or death. Legal and extralegal factors which impact jurors' decision-making are important for understanding how they reach their final decision. One theoretical explanation as to how jurors reach their sentencing decision is structural aggravation. The theory states that trials are designed to stress the dehumanizing qualities of both the defendant as well as the crime, while at the same time emphasizing empathy for the victim. This study tests the latter part of structural aggravation. The hypothesis is that jurors who possess empathy for the victims in homicide cases, will be more receptive to aggravating evidence presented to them during the trial. This dissertation utilized data from the Capital Jury Project, which gathers both quantitative and qualitative information about jurors' experiences in capital cases. Information was obtained from 667 jurors in 14 states. Hierarchical regression was used to test whether or not juror empathy for the victim impacted their receptivity to aggravation. The findings suggest that jurors who possess empathy for victims are not more likely to be receptive to aggravating evidence. What did matter however were the gender of the juror and the severity of the crime. The more severe the crime, the more receptive the juror was to aggravating evidence. The gender of the juror was also significant. Male jurors were more receptive to aggravation. Because race and to a lesser extent gender, have been important factors in capital sentencing outcomes, several demographic variables were combined to test for an interactive effect on receptivity to aggravating evidence. The model disclosed no such interaction effect. While jurors who express empathy for the victim are not more receptive to aggravating evidence, there is still limited support for Haney's structural aggravation theory. Prosecutors, by stressing the severity of the crime in both the guilt and penalty phases, affect juror decision-making in that jurors are more receptive to aggravation evidence and thus more likely to sentence the defendant to death.
Russell tests the U.S. Supreme Court's assumption that the procedure used to select jurors who impose the death penalty does not inject racial bias into the jury. In Georgia, those who supported the death penalty and were placed on juries were more likely to sentence black defendants to death. Further, those who supported the death penalty tend to hold attitudes that are linked to racial bias and act as surrogate measures for racial bias. He also finds no support in his analysis for the results of other research that indicate that death penalty jurors are conviction prone. Although earlier empirical evidence has suggested a consistent pattern of race-related differential sentencing, Russell's study is the first to demonstrate that the death qualification tends to eliminate moderate attitudes and concentrate racial bias in death penalty juries. The Death Penalty and Racial Bias suggests a clear direction for future policy research into the neutrality of death-qualified juries.
Flexon presents an interdisciplinary perspective to the problem of racial disparities in capital case outcomes. In doing so, research from social and cognitive psychology concerning stereotypes and attitude influence were bridged with other empirical findings concerning racial disparities in capital sentencing. Specifically, the psychology of stereotypes and attitudes are used to help explain how racial discrimination can operate undetected among death qualified jurors while producing sentencing discrepancies. The introduction of a potential source of bias information concerning criminal justice and race also is offered. Results indicate that prejudicial ideas are likely operating to influence capital sentencing decisions.
Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative linguistic methods, this book explores the means through which language helps to make death penalty decisions possible - how specific linguistic choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials. The analysis draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in diverse counties across Texas, including participant observation in four capital trials and post-verdict interviews with the jurors who decided those cases. Given the impossibility of access to actual capital jury deliberations, this integration of methods aims to provide the clearest possible window into jurors' decision-making. Using methods from linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and multi-modal discourse analysis, Conley analyzes interviews, trial talk, and written legal language to reveal a variety of communicative practices through which jurors dehumanize defendants and thus judge them to be deserving of death. By focusing on how language can both facilitate and stymie empathic encounters, the book addresses a conflict inherent to death penalty trials: jurors literally face defendants during trial and then must distort, diminish, or negate these face-to-face interactions in order to sentence those same defendants to death. The book reveals that jurors cite legal ideologies of rational, dispassionate decision-making - conveyed in the form of authoritative legal language - when negotiating these moral conflicts. By investigating the interface between experiential and linguistic aspects of legal decision-making, the book breaks new ground in studies of law and language, language and psychology, and the death penalty.
The present research explores whether inducing empathy in death-qualified mock jurors leads to fewer death sentences in a penalty phase trial. Previous research has shown that inducing empathy in jurors leads to lesser sentences and perceived responsibility of the perpetrator for the crime. However, none of this research has examined death penalty cases, and most have focused on instances where the victim was also the perpetrator of a separate crime against the defendant (e.g., abuse). Extending this line of research, the present study examines whether these results extend to instances where the perpetrator and victim are strangers. Additionally, considering the influence certain impairments may have on the perpetrator's competence, the study also explores instances where the perpetrator exhibits evidence of mental illness, brain damage, or experience of sexual abuse. To examine this, participants were presented with a trial transcript and half of these participants were shown an empathy-inducing prompt. After providing a sentence of life in prison without parole (LWOP) or death, mock jurors’ level of empathy and the responsibility they placed on the defendant for the crime were measured. Results indicated that empathy induction did not influence empathy level nor verdict. However, predictors of verdict included confidence of the mock juror as well as the total responsibility they placed on the defendant.
An extraordinary study of the people directly involved in death-penalty decisions
[Footnote]1 Jack Glaser, Karin D. Martin, Kimberly B. Kahn, Possibility of death sentence has divergent effect on verdicts for black and white defendants 39 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 539 (2015).