In his new book, Death by Design: Capital Punishment as a Social Psychological System, Craig Haney argues that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the events that lead to death sen­tenc­ing itself, are main­tained through a sys­tem that dis­tances and dis­en­gages peo­ple from the true nature of the task. Haney, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, relies on his own research and that oth­er of oth­er sci­en­tists in approach­ing the ques­tion, ​“How can nor­mal, moral peo­ple par­tic­i­pate in a process designed to take the life of anoth­er?”

The book cites three key fac­tors that skew the jus­tice sys­tem to facil­i­tate death sen­tences: a jury selec­tion process that favors those who are more like­ly to sup­port cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and to con­vict defen­dants, com­pli­cat­ed sen­tenc­ing instruc­tions that jurors do not under­stand, and cul­tur­al and media myths about crime. ​“The flaws that rid­dle the sys­tem com­bine and oper­ate in tan­dem. They help enable peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate in behav­ior – actions designed to take the life of anoth­er per­son – that many of them oth­er­wise would reject or resist,” Haney con­cludes.

In ​“Death by Design,” Haney rec­om­mends a series of exten­sive reforms could improve the fair­ness of cap­i­tal tri­als. His sug­gest­ed changes include encour­ag­ing edu­ca­tion about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and alter­na­tive sen­tences such as life with­out parole, work­ing with jour­nal­ists to pro­vide a more accu­rate and bal­anced pic­ture of the real caues of vio­lence in soci­ety, strength­en­ing the require­ment that attor­neys ful­ly and com­plete­ly inves­ti­gate and present to jurors the social his­to­ry of defen­dants dur­ing the sen­tenc­ing process, and revis­ing jury instruc­tions to improve their under­stand­ing of mit­i­ga­tion.

(Oxford University Press, 2005) See Books and Sentencing. See also DPIC’s report ​“Blind Justice: Juries Deciding Life and Death With Only Half the Truth.”

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