Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis

Abstract

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 minority death row inmates convicted of killing whites face higher execution probabilities than other capital offenders. Theoretically relevant contextual factors with explanatory power include minority presence in nonlinear form, political ideology, and votes for Republican presidential candidates. Inasmuch as there is little or no systematic research on the individual and contextual factors that influence execution probabilities, these findings fill important gaps in the literature.

Race, Crime, and Punishment in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

“…Recent research in Maryland (Paternoster and Brame 2008) (Pierce and Radelet 2005) provides equally persuasive evidence of racial disparities in the capital sentencing process in those states during the 1990s and 2000s. There also is evidence of racial disparity in federal capital sentencing (US Department of Justice 2000; that blacks, and to a lesser extent, Hispanics, who kill whites are executed a higher rates than other death-sentenced offenders ( Jacobs et al 2007); and that those who kill white females face higher odds of a death sentence than other offenders (Williams, Demuth, and Holcomb 2007).…”

İdam Mahkûmlarının Son Sözlerinde İnkâra Yer Verme Durumları: Teksas Huntsville Hapishanesi Örneklemi

“…Echoing Jacobs, Qian, Carmichael and Kent (2007), this study also identified the importance of individual differences in terms of claiming innocence in the last statements. Parallel to Jones and Beck (2007), families were found to play a role in the last statements of death row inmates in that they referred to their own families and/or the victim's families while denying their crimes in their last statements.…”

“…Individual differences of death row inmates and contextual factors at state level deserve close attention since they could give us important clues about the delicacies of death and dying. Even minority presence and political ideology might come to the fore as part of above-mentioned factors in execution (Jacobs, Qian, Carmichael, & Kent, 2007).…”

A Refugee from Justice? Disparate Treatment in the Federal Court of Canada

“…In terms of race and ethnicity in the United States, African American defendants are "5.3 percentage points more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison," and they "have twenty percent longer sentences than whites, on average, holding constant age, gender, and [the] recommended sentence length from [sentencing] guidelines" (Bushway and Piehl 2001, 752, 733). Research also has shown that prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty for black defendants than white defendants (Kleck 1981;Baldus, Woodworth, and Pulaski 1990;Jacobs et al 2007). Other studies have focused on the interaction between the races or ethnicities of the defendant and the victim (Baldus, Woodworth, and Pulaski 1990).…”