Research Roundup: Revisiting David Baldus’s Study to Examine Modern Day Use of the Death Penalty

DPI’s new series focus­es on aca­d­e­m­ic research and arti­cles in the field of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. This month’s arti­cle is ​“Sacred Victims: Fifty Years of Data on Victim Race and Sex as Predictors of Execution,” in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, co-authored by Professors Scott Phillips (Department of Sociology & Criminology), Justin Marceau, Sam Kamin, and a J.D. pro­gram alum­na, Nicole King, from the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver.

The authors’ hypoth­e­sis is that ​“the vic­tim-based dis­par­i­ties in death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions doc­u­ment­ed in pre­vi­ous work, includ­ing [Professor David] Baldus’s, are dri­ven not by race alone, but by the com­bi­na­tion of the victim’s race and sex.” (p.73) Their find­ings sup­port this hypoth­e­sis and, what is more, show­case that as the defen­dant moves from sen­tenc­ing towards exe­cu­tion, the neg­a­tive impact of race and gen­der (espe­cial­ly when the vic­tim was a white woman) becomes more salient. The dis­trict attor­ney was more like­ly to seek death, the authors found, the jury was more like­ly to impose death, and the con­demned defen­dant was more like­ly to be exe­cut­ed if the vic­tim is a white woman. (p.73) They also pro­vide a poten­tial alter­na­tive expla­na­tion ​“that the pros­e­cu­tion is more care­ful in tri­als involv­ing white female vic­tims,” thus lead­ing to few­er rever­sals and high­er rates of exe­cu­tion. (p.95) In addi­tion, the authors eval­u­ate the geog­ra­phy of these dis­par­i­ties and poten­tial his­tor­i­cal con­text, con­clud­ing that “[I]n every for­mer Confederate state, those who killed a white woman were more like­ly than oth­er killers to be exe­cut­ed. The low­est dis­par­i­ty was in Florida, where killers of white female vic­tims were exe­cut­ed at about 1.9 times the rate that would be expect­ed based on death eli­gi­bil­i­ty; the high­est dis­par­i­ty was 4.2 times the expect­ed rate in Louisiana.” (p.104) 

As an out­come of logis­tic regres­sions, the authors found that ​“the odds of a death sen­tence were six­teen times greater if the vic­tim was a white woman than if the vic­tim was a Black man.” (p.67) Among those who were exe­cut­ed, the authors found that 30% were exe­cut­ed for the killing of a white woman, com­pared with 19% if the vic­tim was a white man, 10% if the vic­tim was a Black woman, and 0% if the vic­tim was a Black man. By using the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report (25,547 homi­cides report­ed to the FBI in Georgia between 1976 and 2019), the authors also con­tend that their find­ings can be extrap­o­lat­ed to other states. 

Disparities first iden­ti­fied by Professor Baldus in his land­mark Georgia study con­tin­ue to be preva­lent in con­tem­po­rary data, point­ing to both a poten­tial bias in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion and the endur­ing nature of that bias. The results from Phillips et al. uti­lized DPI’s exten­sive Census data.