The Origins of LWOP in California

Chapter 1 turns to the Californian Congress where opponents of the death penalty first lobbied for LWOP before legislators. It critically examines the period during which the idea of sentencing offenders to life imprisonment with no possibility of release first emerged, starting in the early 1900s and culminating with the introduction of LWOP for capital murder in 1978 in the Californian Penal Code. What emerges from this archival research is that different experts—prison wardens, police officials, academics, spiritual leaders, and criminologists—offered LWOP as a strategic way for legislators to argue against the death penalty. This novel approach was however diverted from its progressive endeavours to serve more punitive agendas. Legislators concerned with preserving capital punishment in contexts of sensationalized crimes and early forms of populist demands drove the reforms that introduced LWOP. This historical investigation reveals that the punishment’s particular severity can serve agendas which are seemingly in tension with one another.

Does Psychopathy Influence Juror Decision-Making in Capital Murder Trials? “The Devil is in the (Methodological) Details”

Concerns about the potentially stigmatizing impact of psychopathy evidence in court have been expressed for decades. Saks et al. manipulated diagnostic information (e.g., psychopathy, schizophrenia) and the basis for that evidence (e.g., clinical, neuroimaging) to examine effects on outcomes in two capital murder case vignettes. Somewhat surprisingly, their psychopathy manipulation did not have a consistently adverse impact on juror attitudes relative to other diagnoses or a control condition. We administered the Saks et al. stimulus materials to college students ( N = 569), but added a scale quantifying participant ratings of how psychopathic they perceived the defendant to be. Notably, we obtained uniformly high mean psychopathy ratings across all study conditions. In addition, participants who rated the defendant as more psychopathic (regardless of condition) were more likely to support death verdicts. We discuss the implications of our results in terms of the design of experimental manipulations of mental health evidence for jury simulations.

Unequal Protection Under the Law: Encoding Racial Disparities for Hispanics in the Case of Smith v. Georgia

We interrogate the Georgia Supreme Court ruling in the 2002 capital murder trial of Brandon Smith to illustrate how “fair cross section” implementation in Georgia’s legal system was used to create case law that institutionalized discrimination against Hispanic participation in the jury process. By paying scrupulous attention to legal precedents specifically intended to widen inclusion under the equal protection clause, the Justices’ decision put into place one legal standard for Hispanic participation in the jury process and another standard for all other groups. Using critical race theory, we argue that legal precedents based on distorted perceptions of the composition of the Hispanic community in new destination states, common practices of jury forced balancing and sole reliance on decennial census numbers collided to create case law that unintentionally deprives Georgia’s Hispanics of equal protection under the law and may contribute to the disproportionate presence of racialized minorities and Hispanic youth in the criminal justice system.

Slow Law: Temporal Logics in US Death Penalty Mitigation Investigations

From arrest to sentencing, cases in which the defendant is charged with capital murder in the United States take substantially longer to resolve than homicide cases in which prosecutors choose not to seek the death penalty. One might reasonably attribute the slowness of capital trials to heightened procedural safeguards that attend the potential deprivation of life. In this article, I suggest that this explanation, straightforward as it is, glosses over more probing and analytically interesting truths about the complex temporal dimensions of death penalty trials. Based on my experiences as both a former defense advocate and an ethnographic researcher of capital defense practices, the slowness of capital cases revolves in large measure around the investigative pursuits of sentencing mitigation. Mitigation investigation’s knowledge practices are informed by distinct temporal operations whose interrelations feed into a deeper logic to capital defense advocacy. This article parses out and traces the connections between these inner workings, using social theory on time to articulate the processes by which mitigation’s temporal logics produce the characteristically slow pace of death penalty cases. I conclude with brief thoughts speculating how the temporal analysis experimented with here might be extended to processes of US criminal adjudication more broadly.

Defining Death-Eligible Murder in China

The central purpose of this Article is to illuminate the process and politics of China’s sentencing regime for capital murder. Since 2007, China’s death penalty reform has resulted in a recalibration of the convicted murderer’s eligibility for execution. The reform heralded a substantial decline in the number of capital sentences, as well as a rise of an alternative to execution: the suspended death sentence. In the reform era, how do Chinese courts determine who should be spared from execution and who deserves the ultimate punishment of death? This Article uses a quantitative analysis of 369 capital murder cases, as well as elite interviews with forty judges—from China’s provincial-level Higher People’s Courts and the Supreme People’s Court—to analyze the political logic behind Chinese courts’ approach to defining the execution worthiness of convicted murderers. While there is a rich literature on capital sentencing in the United States, there is a dearth of comparative analysis of the challenges Chinese courts face in drawing the distinction between life and death sentences in the country’s unique social and political context. This Article seeks to make a contribution to this crucial topic.

Rape, Race, and Capital Punishment: An Enduring Cultural Legacy of Lethal Vengeance?

Historical analyses of southern statutes (i.e., Slave Codes, Black Codes, “Jim Crow,” etc.) and their enforcement reveals evidence of an enduring cultural legacy prescribing lethal vengeance to Blacks who violate White sensibilities, especially for Black males accused of sexually assaulting White females. Using a population of official data on capital murder trials in North Carolina (1977–2009), this study examines the degree to which this cultural legacy endures to the present by examining the joint effects of offender’s race and rape/sexual assault on the capital sentencing outcomes of capital murder trial involving White female victims. Our findings reveal support for the continuing endurance of this cultural legacy of lethal vengeance.

Letters to Casey Anthony, a woman accused of murder

This chapter is based on an analysis of letters sent by members of the public to Casey Anthony, while she was awaiting trial for the capital murder of her daughter, Caylee. Caylee Anthony went missing in Orlando, Florida, in 2008, which Casey did not report to the police. After Casey’s mother had reported her granddaughter’s disappearance several weeks later, Casey was charged with her murder. Caylee’s body was not discovered until two months after this. The case was very high profile and received intense media coverage, including via social media. In June 2010, Florida’s state attorney’s office released letters that had been sent to Casey while she was in jail. She was tried and acquitted of Caylee’s murder and manslaughter in 2011. This chapter focuses on the letters sent to Casey by people who did not know her personally. It explores how they negotiated what they already knew of her and her case from media sources in relation to their own experiences and biography, in order to relate to Casey. In doing so, it analyses how correspondents variously drew on, utilised, reshaped and rejected discourses of femininity that circulate in legal and media constructions of high profile cases of women accused of murder. The chapter also examines how correspondents’ identification with, or rejection of, Casey Anthony and elements of her story was part of the process of their own identity construction

Victim Impact Statements: How Victim Social Class Affects Juror Decision Making

Although the Supreme Court has ruled that victim impact statements (VIS) should be allowed at trial, the concern voiced in Payne v. Tennessee (1991) and Furman v. Georgia (1972) was that VIS might enable jurors to make comparative judgments about the worth of the victim. This study examined the effect VIS and low and middle socioeconomic status (SES) victims have on jurors’ decisions. Mock jurors listened to 1 of 3 audio recordings of the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial (no VIS, low SES VIS, or middle SES VIS) and were asked to sentence the defendant to either life in prison without parole or death. Results indicated VIS themselves did not significantly affect mock jurors’ sentencing decisions. However, mock jurors who heard the middle SES victim VIS were significantly more likely to sentence the defendant to death compared to those who heard the low SES victim VIS. The results suggest that the concerns of the Supreme Court were valid. Mock jurors were impacted by SES information in the VIS and were more punitive toward the defendant when he killed a higher rather than a lower SES person.