Law Commons^™

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

Review Of The Road To Abolition, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

The two most important questions about the death penalty in the United States today are should we get rid of it and will we get rid of it? While he contributors to this important and interesting new book are unanimous that capital punishment should be abolished, opinions differ on whether abolition is likely to occur in the US any time soon, and if so, how.

If one wants to gain a deeper understanding of the effort to eliminate capital punishment in the U.S. over the last forty years, and what the future holds for this harsh feature of American exceptionalism, …

The Impact Of The Death Penalty On Murder, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

Both history and daily crime sheets underscore a depressing capacity for human violence and inhumanity. Some scholars feel that eliminating capital punishment would be a step toward reducing the toll of human suffering, whereas others feel that retaining the death penalty will prevent some murders at least. Kovandzic, Vieraitis, and Boots (2009, this issue) provide a comprehensive ordinary least-squares (OLS) state panel data assessment of the most recent postmoratorium data available and reach a strong conclusion that the death penalty does not deter murder. This article is an important piece in the complex jigsaw puzzle that will illuminate which factors …