New Podcast: Authors of Tennessee Death-Penalty Study Discuss Arbitrariness

The lat­est edi­tion of Discussions with DPIC fea­tures H.E. Miller, Jr. and Bradley MacLean, co-authors of a recent study on the appli­ca­tion of Tennessee’s death penal­ty. Miller and MacLean describe the find­ings from their arti­cle, Tennessee’s Death Penalty Lottery, in which they exam­ined the fac­tors that influ­ence death-penal­ty deci­sions in the state. 

Based on their sur­vey of thir­ty years of homi­cide cas­es, they found that whether a death sen­tence is imposed is influ­enced far less by the cir­cum­stances of the offense than by arbi­trary fac­tors such as geog­ra­phy, race, and the poor qual­i­ty of defense rep­re­sen­ta­tion. MacLean says, ​“It oper­ates just like a lot­tery. There’s no ratio­nale, there’s no rhyme or rea­son for why an infin­i­tes­i­mal­ly small num­ber of defen­dants are sen­tenced to death and even a much small­er num­ber are actu­al­ly exe­cut­ed, as com­pared to all the defen­dants who are con­vict­ed of first-degree murder.” 

The authors col­lect­ed data on more than 2,500 first-degree mur­der cas­es in Tennessee from 1977 – 2017, and found that about 3.5% of first-degree mur­der defen­dants have been sen­tenced to death and few­er than 0.3% have been exe­cut­ed. Those few who are select­ed for the death penal­ty, though, do not rep­re­sent the worst of the worst, with about 90% of mul­ti­ple-vic­tim mur­ders result­ing in life sen­tences. ​“The bot­tom line is, the peo­ple who get the death penal­ty are the most vul­ner­a­ble, not the ones who com­mit the worst crimes,” MacLean said. 

In the pod­cast, the authors also dis­cuss the lit­i­ga­tion sur­round­ing Tennessee’s method of exe­cu­tion, say­ing, ​“If the state can’t get their method of exe­cu­tion right, then how can we expect them to get any­thing else right about the sys­tem?” They con­clude, ​“The whole point of our study was to look at whether we have prop­er­ly addressed the prob­lem of arbi­trari­ness that the Supreme Court talked about in Furman [v. Georgia, which declared all U.S. death-penal­ty statutes uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly arbi­trary in 1972]. Our con­clu­sion is that our sys­tem is no less arbi­trary, it is just as arbi­trary, as the sys­tems that exist­ed before Furman was decid­ed. …That’s why we believe that our sys­tem is clearly unconstitutional.”