Secondary Annotated Bibliography Brewer, Thomas W. "Race and Jurors' Receptivity to Mitigation in Capital Cases: The Effect of Jurors', Defendants', and Victims' Race in Combination." Law and Human Behavior 28, no. 5 (2004): 529-45. The article begins by explaining the importance of Furman v. Gerogia (1972). Furman v. Gerogia (1972) was a Supreme Court case that decided that death sentences were being handed down in an arbitrary and standard less manner. In response to this ruling many States began to draft guided discretion statutes, that sought to provide a frame work for capital sentencing that would assist jurors in making more reliable decisions. The case also introduced the importance of mitigating evidence when considering death penalty …show more content…
This racial discrimination has led to a discriminatory manner that punishes blacks who victimized whites more severely compared to whites who victimize blacks. Even though race has been abolished as a legally relevant factor in capital sentencings, there are still variations in capital sentencing patterns along racial lines. The author tries to answer the question of how a system that tries to design itself as a racially neutral system can still have racial variations in capital sentencing. The author argues that there is a link between race and empathy in mitigation. The author conducted a study that focused on juror race and receptivity to mitigation and defendant race. The study concluded that in-group/out-group dynamics effected mitigation. Jurors were more receptive in situations where the defendant was the same race compared to where the defendant was a different race. I will use this source as evidence that there are racial biases that effect receptivity towards mitigating factors. This source will help me focus on juror empathy towards …show more content…
The study picked jury-eligible subjects, who were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of the defendant and race of the victim varied. The results of the study indicated that the deliberations created a punitive rather than lenient shift in the jurors’ death sentencing behavior. The white mock jurors had the tendency to sentence black defendants to death more often that white defendants. The author’s main thesis is that there are two important major flaws in the capital jury decision-making process. The first is its unreliability. There are apparent arbitrariness and unpredictability in the outcomes of capital cases. The second flaw is unfairness. Extralegal factors such as race still play a significant role in determining which defendants are sentenced to die and which get to live. The research conducted focuses on those serious flaws and how capital jurors’ lack of instructional comprehension contributes to not only confused decision-making but also to racially discriminatory death sentencing. The authors also conducted a study that focused on the “White male dominance” effect on capital jury deliberations. The results of the mock juries suggested that the race effects for the overall group were driven by the white men
for a dull respondent than for a white prosecutor in a practically identical case. A study in California found that the people who killed whites were general 3 times more slanted to be sentenced to death than the people who killed blacks and more than 4 times more likely than the people who killed Latinos. Looks at exhibit that 96% of states where there have been surveys of race and capital punishment, there was an example of either race-of-casualty or race-of-litigant separation, or both. A respondent was a few times more prone to be sentenced to death if the homicide casualty was white. A January 2003 study discharged by the University of Maryland presumed that race and geology are central point in capital punishment choices.
Primary Annotated Bibliography McCleskey v Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) McCleskey v Kemp is a Supreme Court case that highlighted racism in the death penalty process. The petitioner in the case provided a controversial statistical study that correlated racism in death penalty sentencings. The Supreme Court Justices were asked to answer the question of whether or not the statistical study provided could substantiate that the sentence in the case violated the petitioner’s eighth and fourteenth amendment rights. This case will be the main focus of my research paper.
Name: Instructor: Course: Date: Criminal Justice Stevenson through his book has provided various examples that show that people of color and low-income individuals are more likely to be presumed fully prior to presenting their cases. The author has stated that executions are a good example of how norms and policies are used for the purposes of punishing and controlling the people of color For instance, he argues that one in three black people are expected to be sent to jail in their lifetime. Further on, eighty percent of people on death row are black while 65 percent of homicide victims are black.
Claim One of the claims that Steffensmeier makes in the article is how black judge’s sentences black defendants just as much or more harshly
Tragically, the times of racial predisposition in capital punishment are not a remainder
In McClesky v. Kemp the Supreme Court held that a study showing the death penalty in Georgia was imposed on black defendants disproportionately to white defendants failed to establish that any of the decision makers involved in the process acted with a discriminatory purpose. McClesky is a notable case in several respects. First, it highlighted the integrated nature of the criminal justice system and how each component functions to reach a certain result. Second, it emphasized the debate on which actors in the justice system have the most power and what role that power plays in reaching the result. Third, the case also underscored the importance on prosecutors keeping records of their decisions at varying stages of the criminal justice process.
victim and the defendant may be influential without clear guidance about the deliberation rules. Black suspects and White victims; blacks were more likely to receive a death sentence vs White suspects and black victims “Not only did killing a White person rather than a Black person increase the likelihood of being sentenced to death, but also Black defendants were more likely than White defendants to be sentenced to death” (Eberhaedt, 2006). Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck founded The innocence Project, in 1992, their mission was to free those who were wrongly convicted of crimes through DNA. To date. there are approximately 350 people exonerated of crimes they didn’t commit through the Innocence project.
This was particularly true in cases where Brown was accused of being involved in prison riots or other violent incidents. In these cases, the evidence was often based on the testimony of other inmates or correction officers, which could be unreliable due to the complex power dynamics of prison life. Another factor that influenced the outcome of Brown’s trial was the biases of the jurors. In many of his trials, Brown was an African American man facing a predominantly white jury. This created a significant potential for racial bias, which could influence the jurors’ perceptions of the evidence and the defendant.
During the time of the Willie Francis trial, black lives were reflected as lower class citizens. Black lives were classified as a non-factor of importance and only mattered for the purpose of labor and production. In the small town of St. Martinville there was an evident divide among races and improper use of power; which created a lack of justice in the eyes of the law. There was an air in the town, that if a black person was accused of committing a crime; they must be guilty. Hearsay in the small town of St. Martinville was the law and set the tone for how people were accused and prosecuted.
The author’s studies indicate that the criminal justice system choose majority of their targets and suspects predominantly by race. According to studies conducted by the U. S Department of Justice, the imprisonment rate by race per 100,000 residents over 3,000 black males were imprisoned in the year 2000 compared to white males imprisonment rate of less than 500. This shows that conviction of crime, robbery, murder, and other violence and drug related crimes has a clear discrepancy across racial groups.
According to a report by the state of Washington, the answer seems to be no. For those convicted in trafficking drugs, offenders are almost always charged with the most serious (in the case of multiple charges). Usually, in order to facilitate a plea, the charges will be reduced. Whether or not the defendant pleads guilty at the trial is one of the most important elements in sentencing. Circumstances of the arrest are just as important.
This report is helpful because it highlights how race is influenced on the death penalty. It will help me see if the death penalty is racially neutral. Coker, D. (2003). Addressing the real world of racial injustice in the criminal justice system. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.
Twelve Angry Men is in many ways a love letter to the American legal justice system. We find here eleven men, swayed to conclusions by prejudices, past experience, and short-sightedness, challenged by one man who holds himself and his peers to a higher standard of justice, demanding that this marginalized member of society be given his due process. We see the jurors struggle between the two, seemingly conflicting, purposes of a jury, to punish the guilty and to protect the innocent. It proves, however, that the logic of the American trial-by-jury system does work.
Another issue that was discussed is the inequality of death penalty in practice. There have been serious issues with racial discrimination. For reference in cases with white victims and black defendants convictions occurred twenty two percent of the time while with black victims and white defendants with percentage dropped to a measly three
The justice system that relies on twelve individuals reaching a life-or-death decision has many complications and dangers. The play Twelve Angry Men, by Reiginald Rose, illustrates the dangers of a justice system that relies on twelve people reaching a life-or-death decision because people are biased, they think of a jury system as an inconvenience, and many people aren’t as intelligent as others. The first reason why Reiginald illustrates dangers is because people can be biased or they can stereotype the defendant. The Jurors in Twelve Angry Men relate to this because a few of them were biased and several of them stereotyped the defendant for being from the slums. The defendant in this play was a 19 year old kid from the slums.