Law Commons^™

There's No Evidence That Death Penalty Is A Deterrent Against Crime, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

No abstract provided.

Is Widespread Gun Ownership Worth The Price Of More Violence?, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

No abstract provided.

Empirical Evaluation Of Law: The Dream And The Nightmare, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Evaluation Of The Connecticut Death Penalty System Since 1973: Are There Unlawful Racial, Gender, And Geographic Disparities?, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

This article analyzes the 205 death-eligible murders leading to homicide convictions in Connecticut from 1973–2007 to determine if discriminatory and arbitrary factors influenced capital outcomes. A regression analysis controlling for an array of legitimate factors relevant to the crime, defendant, and victim provides overwhelming evidence that minority defendants who kill white victims are capitally charged at substantially higher rates than minority defendants who kill minorities, that geography influences both capital charging and sentencing decisions (with the location of a crime in Waterbury being the single most potent influence on which death-eligible cases will lead to a sentence of death), and …

An Empirical Evaluation Of The Connecticut Death Penalty System Since 1973: Are There Unlawful Racial, Gender, And Geographic Disparities?, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

This article analyzes the 205 death-eligible murders leading to homicide convictions in Connecticut from 1973–2007 to determine if discriminatory and arbitrary factors influenced capital outcomes. A regression analysis controlling for an array of legitimate factors relevant to the crime, defendant, and victim provides overwhelming evidence that minority defendants who kill white victims are capitally charged at substantially higher rates than minority defendants who kill minorities, that geography influences both capital charging and sentencing decisions (with the location of a crime in Waterbury being the single most potent influence on which death-eligible cases will lead to a sentence of death), and …

The 10-Day Waiting Period Is Reasonable, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

Rarely will the conservative majority on the Supreme Court issue a decision so objectionable that it draws harsh rebukes from sitting conservative, Regan-appointed federal appellate court judges; but 2008's Heller decision, creating an individual constitutional right to keep and bear arms, elicited just that. Jusges Richard Posner and Harvie Wilkinson strongly criticized the decision as an unwise "snow job" of unprincipled rhetoric that violated established principles of constitu­tional interpretation, federalism, and the proper role of thejudiciary in dealing with issues best left to the political branches. The Aug. 22 decision of a federal district court judge in California, who ruled …

Reflections On The Newtown Shooting One Year Later, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

One year has passed since the horrific Newtown school shooting of December 14, 2012, and we have likely learned all that will be known about the tragic events of that day. As we reflect back on the event and the subsequent political and legislative responses, a few points should be noted.

The Death Penalty, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

A system of punishment involving the execution of individuals convicted of a capital crime.

The issue of the death penalty has been an area of enormous academic and political ferment in the United States over the last forty years, with the country flirting with abolition in the 1970s, followed by a period of renewed use of the death penalty, and then a period of retrenchment, reflected in a declining number of death sentences and executions and a recent trend leading six states to abolish the death penalty in the last six years. Internationally, there is a steady movement away from …

Why The Nra Fights Background Checks, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

"We think it's reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone." Did President Barack Obama say that? No, that's from an advertisement taken out by the NRA in USA Today in 1999.

But a more powerful NRA today is in no mood to follow the slogan of their "be reasonable" ad campaign of 14 years ago. This relatively small group -- the NRA boasts that it has 4.5 million members, which is peanuts compared to the roughly 40 million AARP members -- might have the political power to …

Capital Punishment In Connecticut, 1973-2007: A Comprehensive Evaluation From 4686 Murders To One Execution, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

This study explores and evaluates the application of the death penalty in Connecticut from 1973 until 2007, a period during which 4686 murders were committed in the state. The objective is to assess whether the system operates lawfully and reasonably or is marred by arbitrariness, caprice, or discrimination. My empirical approach has three components. First, I provide background information on the overall numbers of murders, death sentences, and executions in Connecticut. The extreme infrequency with which the death penalty is administered in Connecticut raises a serious question as to whether the state’s death penalty regime is serving any legitimate social …

Substance Vs. Sideshows In The More Guns, Less Crime Debate: A Comment On Moody, Lott, And Marvell, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

We are grateful to authors Carlisle Moody, John Lott, and Thomas Marvell (hereafter MLM) for their close attention to our article “The Impact of Right-to- Carry Laws and the NRC Report: Lessons for the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy,” which was published in the American Law and Economics Review (Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang 2011), and then re-issued as a National Bureau of EconomicResearch working paper with some substantively unimportant errors corrected (Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang 2012). (Henceforth, we too will use the abbreviation ADZ to refer to our jointly authored work.) We think the attention to this work is …

Outlier Nation: Homicides, Incarceration, Guns And Gun Culture, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

The killing of 20 children and 6 teachers at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut has shaken the nation enough so that the issue of how to combat America’s unusual level of gun violence is now on the agenda for the first time in almost two decades. In 1994, President Clinton succeeded in getting two major gun control measures: 1) a national background check program that was designed to keep guns away from felons and the mentally ill, and 2) a ban on the type of “assault weapons” used by Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter. Unfortunately, the National Rifle Association …

Do Police Reduce Crime? A Reexamination Of A Natural Experiment, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

We reexamine a natural experiment first studied by Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2004, “DS”). In response to a 1994 terrorist attack against a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, the government implemented 24-hour police surveillance on city blocks with Jewish institutions. Using a control group of blocks without Jewish institutions, DS applied difference-in-differences, finding that increased policing substantially reduced car theft. We explain how the reallocation of police resources from unprotected to protected blocks, shifts in criminal activity to avoid 24-hour police patrols, and a parking prohibition on protected blocks undermine the original design. The intervention may have displaced, rather …

John Donohue, When Social Sciences Save Lives, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

If you think academic work can’t be “emotionally draining”, meet John Donohue, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, who’s teaching law and economics at Bocconi as a short-term visiting professor. In the last six years his academic interests led him to the death rows of Connecticut prisons and his work is the main piece of evidence in a trial which will decide the fate of five inmates sentenced to death and perhaps of six more.

When Will America Wake Up To Gun Violence?, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

Last night's shooting rampage at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, was a nightmare. Authorities have

already arrested a suspect. Four weapons were recovered in the shooting scene, including a shotgun and two

handguns. Twelve people have been killed, with many more injured. According to law enforcement officials, the

weapons were purchased legally by the suspect in the last six months.

The shooting was senseless. And it makes us think once again about how we can address the horrific problem of

gun violence in America.

Time To Kill The Death Penalty, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

Forty years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia struck down the death penalty on the ground that it was applied in an arbitrary manner. Four years later, the Supreme Court accepted the constitutionality of “new and improved” death penalty statutes that were supposed to eliminate the defects condemned in Furman. In bringing back the death penalty in 1976, the Court also cited studies suggesting that executions save lives.

Four decades later, there is plenty of evidence that the death penalty continues to be applied in an unfair manner and not a shred of evidence that …

Study Shows Scales Of Justice Askew When It Comes To Death Penalty, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

A former Yale Law School professor's long-running study now concludes that while extremely rare, the death penalty is a largely random punishment that often hangs on the accused's race and where in Connecticut the crime took place. John Donohue, now at Stanford University, looked at the application of the death penalty between 1973 and 2007, examining and rating 205 cases during a period when 4,686 murders occurred in the state.

The Random Horror Of The Death Penalty, Ny Times Editorial Board

John Donohue

The Supreme Court has not banned capital punishment, as it should, but it has long held that the death penalty is unconstitutional if randomly imposed on a handful of people. An important new study based on capital cases in Connecticut provides powerful evidence that death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime.

Jury Nullification In Modified Comparative Negligence Regimes, Eli K. Best, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

This Article analyzes jury findings from nearly one thousand negligence suits to determine whether juries in modified comparative negligence jurisdictions apportion percentages of negligence differently than juries in pure comparative negligence jurisdictions. We find that juries in modified comparative negligence jurisdictions are substantially less likely to find that a plaintiff was more than 50 percent negligent. This evidence of jury manipulation strengthens the case for pure comparative negligence, which we argue is already superior on theoretical and policy grounds.

Assessing Post-Ada Employment: Some Econometric Evidence And Policy Considerationsjels, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

This article explores the relationship between the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the relative labor market outcomes for people with disabilities. Using individual-level longitudinal data from 1981 to 1996 derived from the previously unexploited Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine the possible effect of the ADA on (1) annual weeks worked; (2) annual earnings; and (3) hourly wages for a sample of 7,120 unique male household heads between the ages of 21 and 65, as well as for a subset of 1,437 individuals appearing every year from 1981 to 1996. Our analysis of the larger sample suggests …

Assessing Post-Ada Employment: Some Econometric Evidence And Policy Considerations, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

In this article, we offer innovative analysis and additional evidence on the relationship between the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the relative labor market outcomes for people with disabilities, the very class protected by its landmark provisions. Using individual-level longitudinal data from 1981 to 1996 derived from the previously unexploited Panel Study of Income Dynamics (“PSID”), we examine the possible effect of the ADA on (1) annual weeks worked; (2) annual earnings; and (3) hourly wages for a sample of 7120 unique male household heads between the ages of 21 and 65 as well as a subset of 1147 …

Testimony In Support Of Connecticut Senate Bill 1035 And House Bill 6425, Abolishing The Death Penalty (2011), John J. Donohue

John Donohue

In 1975, Isaac Ehrlich launched the modern econometric evaluation of the impact of the death penalty on the prevalence of murder with a controversial paper that concluded that each execution would lead to eight fewer homicides (Ehrlich 1975). A year later, the Supreme Court cited Ehrlich’s work in issuing an opinion ending the execution moratorium that had started with the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia. Today it is widely recognized that Ehrlich's national time-series methodology is too unreliable to be published in any economics journal.

Over the last few years, a number of highly technical papers have purported to …

Better Laws Might Have Helped In Tucson, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

In an ideal world, stable, cautious law-abiding citizens would have access to guns and others would not. We would like wise regulation and prudent personal decisions about carrying and using guns. Deciding on the elements of wise laws and consumer decisions requires extensive data analysis beyond any single episode, like the horrific killings in Tucson. But this tragedy highlights some relevant issues.

The Legal Response To Discrimination: Does Law Matter?, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

The topic of the legal response to discrimination is broad and growing. It includes everything from hate crime legislation and governmental prohibition of discrimination in the purchase of housing, cars, and loans, to restrictions on discrimination in the provision of government services and benefits as well as in employment.1 In the latter category alone, the body of law banning discrimination in the workplace has both deepened as the original prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" (Section 703(a)(1) of Tide VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) have been interpreted to prohibit …

Controlling Crime: Strategies And Tradeoffs, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

The United States stands out among developed nations for both its extremely punitive illegal drug policy and the high percentages of its population that have consumed banned substances—particularly marijuana and cocaine. The war against the millions of Americans who use and sell these drugs has cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year and contributed substantially to America’s globally unmatched incarceration rate (Walmsley 2009). Yet it has failed to displace America from among the world leaders in use rates for illegal drugs, even if escalating punitiveness may have contributed to declines in US drug consumption from its peaks in the late …

The Impact Of Right-To-Carry Laws And The Nrc Report: Lessons For The Empirical Evaluation Of Law And Policy, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public— so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2005, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a critical evaluation of the ‘‘more guns, less crime’’ hypothesis using county-level crime data for the period 1977–2000. Seventeen of the eighteen NRC panel members essentially concluded that the existing research was inadequate to conclude that RTC laws increased or decreased crime. The final member of the panel, though, concluded that the NRC_s panel data regressions supported the …

The Impact Of Right To Carry Laws And The Nrc Report: The Latest Lessons For The Empirical Evaluation Of Law And Policy, John J. Donohue, Abhay Aneja, Alexandria Zhang

John Donohue

For over a decade, there has been a spirited academic debate over the impact on crime of laws that grant citizens the presumptive right to carry concealed handguns in public – so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws. In 2004, the National Research Council (NRC) offered a critical evaluation of the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis using county-level crime data for the period 1977-2000. 15 of the 16 academic members of the NRC panel essentially concluded that the existing research was inadequate to conclude that RTC laws increased or decreased crime. One member of the panel thought the NRC's panel data regressions showed …

Book Review - When Brute Force Fails: How To Have Less Crime And Less Punishment, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

Two of the most dramatic social phenomena of the last half century in the United States are the substantial rise in crime that occurred during the 1960s and the equally dramatic drop in crime that began roughly contemporaneously with the advent of the Clinton Administration. The good news is that we have improved things from the violent and crime-filled days of the late 1980s and early 1990s; the bad news is that we have increased our prison population immensely in the effort. We may now be enjoying the return to the crime levels of the early 1960s, but we also …

Estimating The Impact Of The Death Penalty On Murder, John Donohue, Justin Wolfers

John Donohue

No abstract provided.

More Guns, Less Crime Fails Again: The Latest Evidence From 1977 – 2006, John Donohue, Ian Ayres

John Donohue

No abstract provided.