BOOKS: Deadly Justice — A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty

In their new book, Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty, a team of researchers led by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Frank Baumgartner uses forty years of empir­i­cal data to assess whether the mod­ern death penal­ty avoids the defects that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare in Furman v. Georigia (1972) that the nation’s appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly arbi­trary and capri­cious. Their con­clu­sion: ​“A rea­soned assess­ment based on the facts sug­gests not only that the mod­ern sys­tem flunks the Furman test but that it sur­pass­es the his­tor­i­cal death penal­ty in the depth and breadth of the flaws appar­ent in its application.” 

Deadly Justice explores an enor­mous range of issues — includ­ing, among oth­ers, racial, gen­der, and geo­graph­i­cal bias, inno­cence, deter­rence, men­tal health, child­hood abuse, length of time on death row, rever­sal rates, and exe­cu­tion meth­ods — to deter­mine whether the death penal­ty is fair­ly and pro­por­tion­al­ly applied and reserved for the ​“worst of the worst.” Reviewing the data, Baumgartner et al. find that the mod­ern death penal­ty ​“is it just as arbi­trary, just as biased, and just as flawed as the pre-Furman sys­tem.” Worse yet, they write, ​“it has added to these flaws increased lev­els of geo­graph­i­cal focus on the South, even more con­cen­tra­tion in just a few juris­dic­tions, astro­nom­i­cal finan­cial costs unimag­ined in the ear­li­er peri­od, aver­age peri­ods of delay now mea­sured in the decades, odds of rever­sal well over 50 per­cent, rou­tine and often suc­cess­ful last-minute legal maneu­ver­ing even while the inmate is in the exe­cu­tion room and has been pre­pared to be exe­cut­ed, and a med­ical­iza­tion para­dox that was not even imag­ined in the pre-Furman period.” 

In an inter­view with the Houston Chronicle, Baumgartner says “[t]he key dri­ver in the sys­tem” is not the fre­quen­cy of homi­cides or the nature of the mur­der but ​“the choic­es that dis­trict attor­neys make .… There’s real­ly no rhyme or rea­son to it.” He says the biggest change in pub­lic opin­ion began in the 1990s as evi­dence began to mount that ​“there might be inno­cent peo­ple on death row. … The inno­cence argu­ment has real­ly shak­en peo­ple’s faith that you can count on the gov­ern­ment to get it right every sin­gle time. … The sys­tem is so tied up in knots, part­ly because of the con­cern of exe­cut­ing an inno­cent per­son. It’s real­ly hard to jus­ti­fy or have enthu­si­asm about a sys­tem so dys­func­tion­al as the cur­rent mod­ern death penal­ty, even if you’re a prosecutor.”

The researchers have cre­at­ed a web­site that makes avail­able to the pub­lic — with updates — the data report­ed in the book.