In the lat­est edi­tion of the jour­nal Deviant Behavior, soci­ol­o­gist Robert Young of the University of Texas has report­ed that death penal­ty sup­port­ers, such as those who are qual­i­fied to sit on juries in cap­i­tal cas­es, were about a third more like­ly to have prej­u­diced views of blacks. Young’s eval­u­a­tion of polling data also revealed that death penal­ty sup­port­ers are more like­ly to con­vict the defen­dant. When polled, they were near­ly twice as like­ly to say it was worse to let the guilty go free than to con­vict an inno­cent defen­dant. ​“By allow­ing juries in cap­i­tal cas­es to be stacked in favor of con­vic­tion, the courts have cre­at­ed a sys­tem in which cer­tain defen­dants – espe­cial­ly those of African American descent – in essence must prove their inno­cence beyond a rea­son­able doubt,” said Young, who ana­lyzed data from the 1990 to 1996 General Social Survey – a lead­ing barom­e­ter of social trends in the U.S. He notes that those two find­ings rein­force each oth­er and make death penal­ty juries more con­vic­tion prone, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the defen­dant is black. (Washington Post, March 21, 2004) See Race.

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