The Merciful Capital Juror

Report on Capital Juror Decision-Making in Pennsylvania

Forecasting Life and Death : Juror Race , Religion , and Attitude toward the Death Penalty

Determining whether race, sex, or other juror characteristics influence how capital case jurors vote is difficult. Jurors tend to vote for death in more egregious cases and for life in less egregious cases no matter what their own characteristics. And a juror's personal characteristics may get lost in the process of deliberation because the final verdict reflects the jury's will, not the indivi...

Mapping the Racial Bias of the White Male Capital Juror: Jury Composition and the Empathic Divide

This article examines the nature of racial bias in the death sentencing process. After reviewing the various general explanations for the continued significance of race in capital cases, we report the results of an empirical study in which some aspects of racially biased death sentencing are examined in depth. Specifically, in a simulated capital penalty-phase trial setting where participants w...

Race and jurors' receptivity to mitigation in capital cases: the effect of jurors', defendants', and victims' race in combination.

This paper examines the variation in receptivity to mitigation evidence by capital jurors as it varies by the race of the juror, defendant, and victim individually and in combination. Attitudinal and racial characteristics from 865 respondents in the Capital Jury Project were used in the analysis. Using a generalized form of multiple regression, the respondent's receptivity to mitigation eviden...

Expert testimony in capital sentencing: juror responses.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia (1972), held that the death penalty is constitutional only when applied on an individualized basis. The resultant changes in the laws in death penalty states fostered the involvement of psychiatric and psychologic expert witnesses at the sentencing phase of the trial, to testify on two major issues: (1) the mitigating factor of a defendant's abnormal...