A Critical Examination of the “White Victim Effect” and Death Penalty Decision-Making from a Propensity Score Matching Approach: The North Carolina Experience

A Probation Profanation

“…Some research, however, indicates such findings may not be ubiquitous. While confessedly a minority in race/ethnicity inequality scholarship, these studies find little to no support for inequality-related effects in correctional outcomes or, at the very least, present mixed results (e.g., Jennings, Richards, Smith, Bjerregaard, & Fogel, 2014;Morgan & Smith, 2008;Steiner & Wooldredge, 2015). Research into racial/ethnic inequality in corrections research can thus be described as largely confirmatory yet circumspect-a description that applies equally to research into racial/ethnic inequality in probation.…”

A propensity score matching analysis of the relationship between victim sex and capital juror decision-making in North Carolina

“…Scholars suggest that defendant legal factors (e.g., prior record) are the primary determinants of these focal concerns; however, perceptions of focal concerns may also be affected by defendant and victim social-structural characteristics such as age, race, and sex. Court community context may also impact focal concerns because courtroom actors, which in the previous research most often refer to judges and prosecutors (for an exception see Jennings et al, 2014), share ''localized social worlds'' stemming from their shared organizational constraints, local politics, and norms (Kramer and Ulmer, 2002;Ulmer and Bradley, 2006;Ulmer et al, 2007). Although courtroom community context may be less relevant in discussions of jury decision-making, it is important to note that death qualified juries are selected based on similar shared norms regarding the death penalty and they receive a unified set of instructions regarding their jury service (i.e., how to weigh aggravators and mitigators).…”

“…Beyond these specific examples of prior studies that have focused primarily on the role of victim sex, it is relevant to briefly discuss Jennings et al's (2014) recent study that applied a similar methodological and analytical strategy to the one relied on in the current study but for evaluating the role of victim race not victim sex. In this regard, Jennings et al used North Carolina data to critically assess the ''White victim effect'' in death penalty decision-making.…”

“…Recently, PSM is becoming more common as a strategy for estimating more precise estimates relative to traditional regression approaches in the criminological literature generally (e.g., Loughran et al, 2009;Sampson et al, 2006) and death penalty research specifically (e.g., Jennings et al, 2014;Paternoster and Brame, 2008). In this regard, PSM involves the estimation of propensity scores that represent conditional probabilities of receiving a treatment based on a number of potentially relevant covariates or confounders (Rosenbaum and Rubin, 1983).…”

“…In doing so, a myriad of important covariates are included that have been previously shown to be associated with assessments of the death penalty in capital murder trials (e.g., Baldus et al, 1983;Jennings et al, 2014;Brame, 2003, 2008;Williams et al, 2007).…”