The Future of the Death Penalty

Death Penalty

Schaefer, K., J. Hennessy, & J.G. Ponterotto. (2000). Race as a variable in imposing

and carrying out the death penalty in the U.S. Race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, violent crime: The realities and the myths. The Haworth Press, 35-45.

The research question was: given the extent to which the death penalty has been arbitrarily imposed, to what extent are there unbalanced racial demographics in death penalty sentencing?

The hypothesis was that race is a factor in terms of how death penalty sentencing is allocated.

Research was accumulated through the analysis of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports from 1976 to 1995. This source provided information about the race of perpetrators. DOJ capital offender data files were also analyzed for the demographic data for each of the 5,580 of the prisoners condemned to death versus those of offenders from states without death penalties (Schaefer, Hennessey, & Ponterotto, 2000, p. 39).

Q4. The research yielded the finding that while Blacks and Hispanics made up the majority of the population of incarcerated individuals for homicides and the populations of these racial groups in prisons was increasing overall, "Whites were the majority among the executed capital offender population, comprising 172 (55%) of the cases" while "Black offenders constituted 122 (39%) of the cases, followed by 17 (5.4%) offenders of Hispanic ethnicity, and 2 (.6%) offenders identified as other ethnic background" (Schaefer, Hennessey, & Ponterotto, 2000, p. 40). Whites made up the majority of death-row inmates as well, a finding that the researchers deemed to be surprising (Schaefer, Hennessey, & Ponterotto, 2000, p. 41).

The researchers had expected that there would be a larger percentage of African-Americans on death row, particularly given the history of racial discrimination in sentencing in the United States and the higher population of incarcerated African-Americans. However, they did note that there is a tendency for jurors to penalize crimes against whites more stringently than crimes against African-Americans and the perpetrators of homicides are statistically more likely to be the same race as their victims than the opposite race. This could possibly explain the results -- and also underlines that there is still bias in the manner in which punishments are allocated regarding the death penalty.

Lambert, E., S. Jiang, O. Elechi, M. Khondaker, & D. Baker. (2014). A preliminary study of gender differences in death penalty views of college students from Bangladesh, China,

Nigeria, and the United States. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, 12:44-68.

Q1. A notable gender gap exists in the U.S. between men and women: men are far more likely to support the death penalty than their female counterparts. This study attempted to answer the question if this was true in a cross-cultural fashion by comparing survey results from the U.S. to men and women in developing world nations. The nations of Bangladesh, China, and Nigeria were selected as a comparison group because all of these nations have the death penalty and routinely send perpetrators to death (Lambert et al. 2014, p.46).

Q2. The hypothesis of the researchers was that there would be a substantial gender gap between American males and females regarding support for the death penalty, as consistent with previous attitudinal surveys on the topic; however, it was also hypothesized that the other three nations in the study would not exhibit such discrepancies. The dependent variable was death penalty support and the level of death penalty support; the independent variable was gender (Lambert et al. 2014, p.54).

Q4. "A multivariate analysis using ordered ordinal regression was estimated for death penalty support for each nation" based upon samplings of men and women from each selected nation (Lambert et al. 2014, p.56). Convenience samplings of one or two universities were selected in all four nations. Overall, it was found that approximately 64% of the surveyed college students in the U.S. supported the death penalty, a percentage similar to that of the general U.S. population. "About 67%, 67%, and 58% of the Bangladeshi, Chinese, and Nigerian respondents, respectively, supported capital punishment to some degree" (Lambert et al. 2014, p.59). College students were selected to ensure consistency in age, religiosity, and level of education: these variables had been found in previous studies to be the primary determinant of the individual's feelings about capital punishment.