Religious affiliation's influence on judicial death penalty decisions

Religiosity and Influence on Death Penalty Perspectives

The article highlights a study that was conducted with the aim of bringing out the instances where religious affiliations could influence the views of judges on death penalty passed down to the suspects in court. The volunteers were sourced from various religious backgrounds, gender and races. They were asked to first read and sign the consent forms then they had to read a long trial summary and write their own judgements. They to afterwards fill in a questionnaire that was meant to measure their religious attitudes. The religious attitude test was meant to eliminate those participants who had a strong religious inclination that was deemed to be a possible influence in their judgement and remain with those who did not have very strong religious attachments. The second test was to see whether those who remained in the contest still displayed the relationship between death penalty and religiosity even after the death qualification test as stated above. The participants displayed that there was a possibility of judges pronouncing death penalties instead of life imprisonment due to the religious persuasions.

1. Research questions

The researcher in this case set out to carry out a study that would look into the following questions

i. What is the connection between religious beliefs/attachment and the quality of judgments passed particularly where the law allows death sentences.

ii. What is the quality of judgments made by judges with less or no religious affiliations in comparison to those with deep religious attachment, particularly in situations where death sentence is allowed by the law.

2. Research methodology

The researcher sourced for participants with varying backgrounds in terms of religion, race and gender and engaged them in a qualitative research. In this aspect, the opinions and the attitudes of the participants to the subject matter were noted in terms of the range of scale, for instance "strongly agree to strongly oppose." Once the data was collected from the prequalified participants, a second sampling was done among the remaining participants who were considered to have lesser religious inclination this time excluding those that the self-assessment proved to have strong religious persuasions. The second sampling was meant to test whether there would be a difference between the first test and the second test, bearing that the population consistency was different. The researcher also utilized extensive literature review from the previous researches that had been done in the same field.

3. Results

It was established that the demographic differences as well as the religious affiliations or persuasions played a role in the judgments made especially in terms of death sentence. It was established that the males generally supported the death sentence and the Protestants also belonged to this group. The doubters were seen to favor their religious inclinations more which were against the death penalty. It was established also that the doubters were the only people who lest felt that God prescribed death sentence for the murderers, yet other religious groups felt it was the which of God for murderers to be killed as well. The different religious groups were however unanimous in agreeing on the view that God recommends mercy and forgiveness towards criminals. In the second hypothesis where the participants with strong religious affiliations had been removed from the sample size, it was concluded that the 831 respondents showed no significant difference with the total sample before the elimination of the jurors who were not death qualified. It came out that even among these death qualified jurors, there was still a significant role played by their religion in making judgments and that their perspectives on death sentences was not significantly different from the jurors who were eliminated from the research.