Source 1. Strong supporters of the death penalty are more likely to harbor racial prejudices:
In the latest edition of the journal Deviant Behavior, sociologist Robert Young of the University of Texas has reported that death penalty supporters, such as those who are qualified to sit on juries in capital cases, were about a third more likely to have prejudiced views of blacks. Young’s evaluation of polling data also revealed that death penalty supporters are more likely to convict the defendant. When polled, they were nearly twice as likely to say it was worse to let the guilty go free than to convict an innocent defendant. “By allowing juries in capital cases to be stacked in favor of conviction, the courts have created a system in which certain defendants – especially those of African American descent – in essence must prove their innocence beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Young, who analyzed data from the 1990 to 1996 General Social Survey – a leading barometer of social trends in the U.S. He notes that those two findings reinforce each other and make death penalty juries more conviction prone, particularly when the defendant is black. (Washington Post, March 21, 2004)
See Race.Death Penalty Support and Racial Bias
The Effects of Death Qualification
Over the past 30 years, there has been a wealth of research on death qualification and its effects on the representativeness of the juries that result from the process. In the early 1980’s, researchers Robert Fitzgerald and Phoebe Ellsworth found that death qualified jurors are not representative of the general population. Capital juries tend to be less representative with respect to gender and race because women and African Americans are more opposed to the death penalty than white men. The exact magnitude of this effect depends upon the general level of public support for the death penalty. Fitzgerald and Ellsworth found that about 15% of whites were excluded compared to 25% of blacks.
Fitzgerald and Ellsworth also found that the jury in capital trials is more biased towards the prosecution and a guilty verdict as compared to the juries in robbery trials or non-capital murder trials. There is evidence that death qualification biases the jury in two different ways. First, it tends to select jury members who are “conviction prone.” Second, the very process of death qualification may further bias the jurors. Researcher Craig Haney argues that questioning the jurors intensively about punishment, before the trial even starts, suggests that there will be a sentencing phase of the capital trial – implying that the defendant is probably guilty. Likewise, Cowan, Thompson, & Ellsworth found that death qualified juries deliberate less thoroughly and possibly less accurate than in juries that better represent the whole population. These findings led to the Supreme Court case Lockhart v. McCree (1986) (see below).
In the 1990s, the Capital Jury Project reached similar conclusions on the basis of their studies of capital juries. The Capital Jury Project (CJP), a nationwide research endeavor funded by the National Science Foundation, interviewed people who had served on death penalty juries from 15 states around the country. The CJP found that members of minority groups, women, Catholics, and other subgroups are more likely to oppose the death penalty than the population at large. Hence, fewer people belonging to these groups typically serve on a capital jury.
The CJP also collected a variety of information on jury decision-making, again concluding that jury selection itself yields a jury that is more likely to convict a defendant and to impose a death sentence than a jury that was not death-qualified. Likewise, according to the CJP, at sentencing, the jury selected tends to place more emphasis on aggravating factors and to overlook or minimize mitigating factors. The CJP argues that under both Supreme Court standards for capital jury selection, Witherspoon v. Illinois (1968) and Wainwright v. Witt (1985), pro-death penalty tendencies were built into capital juries.
MY SYNTHESIS OF THE TWO SOURCES
The state of Florida, like many states with the death penalty, requires jurors to be "death qualified," meaning that a juror must be willing to consider all possible punishments, including the death penalty. Jurors who refuse to vote for the death penalty under any circumstances are automatically barred from juries hearing first-degree murder cases. Such policies have the effect of excluding many women and African Americans from juries because they are more likely to oppose the death penalty. Typical jury selection procedures tend to eliminate 15% of whites and 25% of African Americans. Catholics, too, are more likely to oppose the death penalty than many other religious groups. Thus, the resulting jury is likely to be top-heavy with white, Protestant males. (Fitzgerald and Ellsworth),
Another problem for minority defendants is that strong proponents of the death penalty are one-third more likely to harbor negative attitudes toward African-Americans (Young). Perhaps an even more alarming fact is that death qualified jurors are more likely to convict than are juries that do not exclude death penalty opponents. Faced with a racially biased and conviction-prone jury, minority defendants are in the position of having to prove their innocence rather than having the state prove their guilt.
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