Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Catholics And Capital Punishment: Do Pope Francis’S Teachings Matter In Policy Preferences?, Francis T. Cullen, Amanda Graham, Kellie R. Hannan, Alexander L. Burton, Leah C. Butler, Velmer S. Burton Jr.

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

In the United States, Catholics make up more than 50 million members of the adult population, or about one in five Americans. It is unclear whether their religious affiliation shapes Catholics’ views on public policy issues, ranging from the legality of abortion to criminal justice practices. Capital punishment is especially salient, given that Pope Francis announced in 2018—as official Catholic Church teaching—that the death penalty is “inadmissible” under all circumstances. Based on two national surveys, the current project explores Catholics’ support for state executions before (2017) and after (2019) the Pope’s momentous change in the church’s Catechism. At present, little …

Racial Sympathy And Support For Capital Punishment: A Case Study In Concept Transfer, Kellie R. Hannan, Francis T. Cullen, Leah C. Butler, Amanda K. Graham, Alexander L. Burton, Velmer S. Burton Jr.

Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology Faculty Publications

Beliefs about race, especially racial resentment, are key predictors of public support for capital punishment and punitiveness generally. Drawing on a conceptual innovation by political scientist Jennifer Chudy, we explore the utility of transferring into criminology her construct of racial sympathy – or Whites’ concern about Blacks’ suffering. First, across three data sets, we replicate Chudy’s finding that racial sympathy and resentment are empirically distinct constructs. Second, based on a national-level 2019 YouGov survey (n = 760 White respondents) and consistent with Chudy’s thesis, racial sympathy is then shown to be significantly related to the race-specific view that capital punishment …

The Political Development Of Capital Punishment In The Modern Moroccan State, Mia Barr

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The modern Moroccan state seen today is very young. Having only been independent from France since 1956, the country has spent the last sixty-four years crafting its post-colonial statehood. What has emerged is a hybrid political system with powers split, however unequally, between the King and his inner circle, known as the makhzen, and the Parliament. Not only is the monarchy constitutional—meaning that its legitimacy is literally written into the primary governing document of Morocco, which had its last referendum in 2011—but it is also self-sustaining and self-legitimizing, for the monarchy uses its constitutional powers to grant itself further powers …

Reimagining The Death Penalty: Targeting Christians, Conservatives, Spearit

Articles

This Article is an interdisciplinary response to an entrenched legal and cultural problem. It incorporates legal analysis, religious study and the anthropological notion of “culture work” to consider death penalty abolitionism and prospects for abolishing the death penalty in the United States. The Article argues that abolitionists must reimagine their audiences and repackage their message for broader social consumption, particularly for Christian and conservative audiences. Even though abolitionists are characterized by some as “bleeding heart” liberals, this is not an accurate portrayal of how the death penalty maps across the political spectrum. Abolitionists must learn that conservatives are potential allies …

Public Support For The Death Penalty In A Red State: The Distrustful, The Angry, And The Unsure, Lisa Kort-Butler, Colleen M. Ray

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s 2015 legislative repeal of the death penalty and the 2016 electoral reinstatement, we examined public support for capital punishment. Using two years of statewide survey data, we compared respondents who preferred the death penalty for murder, those who preferred other penalties, and those who were unsure, a respondent group often excluded from research. To understand what distinguishes among these groups, we examined media consumption, instrumental and expressive feelings about crime, and confidence and trust in the government regarding criminal justice. Results revealed that those who preferred the death penalty expressed more anger about crime …

Age, Period, And Cohort Effects On Death Penalty Attitudes In The United States, 1974–2014, Amy L. Anderson, Robert Lytle, Philip Schwadel

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In this article, we further the understanding of both changes in public opinion on capital punishment in the United States and changes in the factors associated with public opinion on the death penalty. Support for the death penalty may be motivated by events happening during specific time periods, and it can vary across birth cohorts as a result of cohort-specific socialization processes, demographic changes, and formative events that are specific to each generation. An explication of the sources of and variation in death penalty attitudes over time would benefit from the accounting for the age of the respondent, the year …

Criminal Justice And (A) Catholic Conscience, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is one person's reflections on how an important influence on his own sense of moral values -- Jesus Christ -- affects his thinking about his own approach to his role as a public official in a secular society, using the vital topic of criminal justice as a focal point. This article draws several important lessons from Christ's teachings about the concept of the other that are relevant to issues of criminal justice. Using Catholicism as a framework, this article addresses, among other things, capital punishment and denying the opportunity for redemption; the problem of racial disparities in the …

Institutionalized Racism And The Death Penalty, Ashleigh Ellis

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Overtime, support for capital punishment has evolved. Compared to previous decades, support has changed amongst different variables such as: age, race, gender, and political perspective; therefore, today, these variables have changed the amount of support for it. For example, as of today, 6 states have repealed the death penalty with New Jersey being the first in 2007 to do so in 40 years. As memories of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era have faded due to generational replacement, American society today still has this racial gap, however it is due to this racial resentment or symbolic resentment that the …

Racial Discrimination And The Death Penalty: An Analysis Of The United States' Judicial System, Jessica Recarey, Nerses Kopalyan

McNair Poster Presentations

Racial discrimination plays a role in the administration of the death penalty. This research analyzes the history, and past scholarly research, of the death penalty. The purpose of this research is to understand the correlation between racial discrimination and those sentenced to death. This study includes a literature review regarding the different aspects of the death penalty and race. Following the literature review, an analysis is performed of both previous literature and current death penalty statistics that augments the discussion of the death penalty.

Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has begun to regulate non-capital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Though both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate lines of doctrine respond to structural imbalances in non-capital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on …

Hagerman, Henry Thomas, 1862-1935 (Sc 443), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 443. Legal papers setting the execution date of Jim Buckner, African American, Marion County, Kentucky, as 9 June 1911, and stay of execution by Acting Governor William Hopkinson Cox until 8 July 1911, because of the incompletion of the installation of the electrocution apparatus. Henry Thomas Hagerman, warden of Kentucky Penitentiary, Eddyville, attested to Buckner’s death.

Documentation, Documentary, And The Law: What Should Be Made Of Victim Impact Videos?, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the Supreme Court sanctioned the introduction of victim impact evidence in the sentencing phase of capital cases in Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808 (1991), there have been a number of reported decisions in which that evidence has taken the form of videos composed of home-produced still photographs and moving images of the victim. Most of these videos were first shown at funerals or memorial services and contain music appropriate for such occasions. This article considers the probative value of victim impact videos and responds to the call of Justice John Paul Stevens, made in a statement regarding the …

Commonwealth Of Kentucky V. William P. King, Et Al. (Sc 1744), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 1744. Record of trial held in Simpson County, Kentucky of William P. King, Charles Smith, Abraham Owen and seven others for the murder of Harvey King. Defendants and victim had all participated in a previous train robbery. Also includes a photocopy of The Life of King and Owen, Written by Themselves, Revised and Prepared by Rev. L. M. Horn, Explaining the Railroad Robbery and Murder of Harvey King (Louisville, Ky., 1867); and “‘A High Handed Outrage:’ The King & Owens Railroad Robbery of 1866,” a paper written …

Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, And Death Sentences, David Jacobs, Stephanie L. Kent, Jason T. Carmichael

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

Capital punishment is the most severe punishment, yet little is known about the social conditions that lead to death sentences. Racial threat explanations imply that this sanction will be imposed more often in jurisdictions with larger minority populations, but some scholars suggest that a tradition of vigilante violence leads to increased death sentences. This study tests the combined explanatory power of both accounts by assessing statistical interactions between past lynchings and the recent percentage of African Americans after political conditions and other plausible effects are held constant. Findings from count models based on different samples, data, and estimators suggest that …

Killing For The State: The Darkest Side Of American Nursing, Dave Holmes, Cary H. Federman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ‘caring’ nursing discourse and the most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practices the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of death work as an application of healthcare professionals’ skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of …

A Broken System, Part Ii: Why There Is So Much Error In Capital Cases And What Can Be Done About It, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Andrew Gelman, Valerie West, Garth Davies, Alexander Kiss

Faculty Scholarship

There is growing awareness that serious, reversible error permeates America’s death penalty system, putting innocent lives at risk, heightening the suffering of victims, leaving killers at large, wasting tax dollars, and failing citizens, the courts and the justice system.

Our June 2000 Report shows how often mistakes occur and how serious it is: 68% of all death verdicts imposed and fully reviewed during the 1973-1995 study period were reversed by courts due to serious errors.

Analyses presented for the first time here reveal that 76% of the reversals at the two appeal stages where data are available for study were …

A Broken System: Error Rates In Capital Cases, 1973-1995, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

There is a growing bipartisan consensus that flaws in America's death-penalty system have reached crisis proportions. Many fear that capital trials put people on death row who don't belong there. Others say capital appeals take too long. This report – the first statistical study ever undertaken of modern American capital appeals (4,578 of them in state capital cases between 1973 and 1995) – suggests that both claims are correct.

Capital sentences do spend a long time under judicial review. As this study documents, however, judicial review takes so long precisely because American capital sentences are so persistently and systematically fraught …

Death Is The Whole Ball Game, Jeffrey A. Fagan, James S. Liebman, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

In Capital Appeals Revisited and The Meaning of Capital Appeals, Barry Latzer and James N.G. Cauthen argue that a study of capital appeals should focus only on overturned findings of guilt, and complain that in A Broken System we examine all overturned capital verdicts. But the question they want studied cannot provide an accurate evaluation of a system of capital punishment. By proposing to count only "conviction" error and not "sentence" error, Latzer and Cauthen ignore that if a death sentence is overturned, the case is no longer capital and the system of capital punishment has failed to achieve its …

Death Matters – A Reply To Latzer And Cauthen, James S. Liebman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

The legal treatment of capital punishment in the United States "rests squarely on the predicate that the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however long. Death, in its finality, differs more from life imprisonment than a 100-year prison term differs from one of only a year or two. This predicate is among "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and determine whether a punishment is "cruel and unusual" in violation of the Constitution. Because "'[f]rom the point of view of the defendant, [death] is different in both its severity …

Murder, Capital Punishment, And Deterrence: A Review Of The Evidence And An Examination Of Police Killings., William C. Bailey, Ruth Peterson

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

This paper reviews and assesses the empirical literature on murder, capital punishment, and deterrence. There is a large body of evidence regarding these issues, with studies yielding a rather consistent pattern of nondeterrence. However, most investigations are limited because they rely upon the general homicide rate as the criterion variable, although both legally and theoretically, different types of murder may be differentially subject to deterrence. As an example of how deterrence investigations may benefit from examining different types of homicide, we conduct a monthly time-series analysis of the possible deterrent effect of the provision for capital punishment, levels of execution, …

Murder And Capital-Punishment In The Evolving Context Of The Post-Furman Era, Ruth D. Peterson, William C. Bailey

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

In view of (1) escalating national attention, and political and judicial activity centering on capital punishment during the past decade and a half, and (2) concomitant changes in homicides this paper investigates the impact of the death penalty on state homicide rates for the post-Furman period, 1973 -84 The research also addresses the debate over the relative merits of the contiguous state matching strategy versus multiple regression as a means of controlling for the influence of possible confounding factors in examining the capital punishment/homicide relationship. The two approaches yield quite similar results. Consistent with a long line of deterrence research, …

Deterrence And The Celerity Of The Death Penalty - A Neglected Question In Deterrence Research, William C. Bailey

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

This paper examines the deterrent effect of the celerity of the death penalty on homicide rates. Although in recent years there have been a number of investigations of the certainty of execution and deterrence, the effect of celerity of execution has not been examined empirically. As a result, we can only speculate about the merit of the deterrence hypothesis for the celerity of executions, and how previous deterrence and death penalty investigations may be biased due to celerity being ignored. The deterrent effect of the certainty and celerity of the death penalty on homicide rates is examined cross-sectionally for states. …

Review Of Executions In America, William C. Bailey

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

Reviews the book "Executions in America," by William J. Bowers.

Murder And Death Penalty, William C. Bailey

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

The article examines the relationship between homicide and capital punishment. Studies by several researches have convinced most students of homicide that the ineffectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to murder has been demonstrated conclusively. Not all remain convinced, however, of the conclusiveness of the evidence. Comparative examinations of homicide rates before and after abolition, and in some cases, the restoration of the death penalty, have also questioned the efficacy of capital punishment. In sum, the evidence reported here falls within the pattern of previous death penalty investigations which span five decades.