Criminology Commons^™

Who Survives On Death Row? An Individual And Contextual Analysis, David Jacobs, Jason T. Carmichael, Zhenchao Qian, Stephanie L. Kent

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

What are the relationships between death row offender attributes, social arrangements, and executions? Partly because public officials control executions, theorists view this sanction as intrinsically political. Although the literature has focused on offender attributes that lead to death sentences, the post-sentencing stage is at least as important. States differ sharply in their willingness to execute and less than 10 percent of those given a death sentence are executed. To correct the resulting problems with censored data, this study uses a discrete-time event history analysis to detect the individual and state-level contextual factors that shape execution probabilities. The findings show that …