The Future of the Death Penalty Essay

Total Length: 902 words ( 3 double-spaced pages)

Total Sources: 2

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Death Penalty

Schaefer, K., J. Hennessy, & J.G. Ponterotto. (2000). Race as a variable in imposing

and carrying out the death penalty in the U.S. Race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, violent crime: The realities and the myths. The Haworth Press, 35-45.

The research question was: given the extent to which the death penalty has been arbitrarily imposed, to what extent are there unbalanced racial demographics in death penalty sentencing?

The hypothesis was that race is a factor in terms of how death penalty sentencing is allocated.

Research was accumulated through the analysis of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports from 1976 to 1995. This source provided information about the race of perpetrators. DOJ capital offender data files were also analyzed for the demographic data for each of the 5,580 of the prisoners condemned to death versus those of offenders from states without death penalties (Schaefer, Hennessey, & Ponterotto, 2000, p. 39).

Q4. The research yielded the finding that while Blacks and Hispanics made up the majority of the population of incarcerated individuals for homicides and the populations of these racial groups in prisons was increasing overall, "Whites were the majority among the executed capital offender population, comprising 172 (55%) of the cases" while "Black offenders constituted 122 (39%) of the cases, followed by 17 (5.4%) offenders of Hispanic ethnicity, and 2 (.6%) offenders identified as other ethnic background" (Schaefer, Hennessey, & Ponterotto, 2000, p.
40). Whites made up the majority of death-row inmates as well, a finding that the researchers deemed to be surprising (Schaefer, Hennessey, & Ponterotto, 2000, p. 41).

The researchers had expected that there would be a larger percentage of African-Americans on death row, particularly given the history of racial discrimination in sentencing in the United States and the higher population of incarcerated African-Americans. However, they did note that there is a tendency for jurors to penalize crimes against whites more stringently than crimes against African-Americans and the perpetrators of homicides are statistically more likely to be the same race as their victims than the opposite race. This could possibly explain the results -- and also underlines that there is still bias in the manner in which punishments are allocated regarding the death penalty.

Lambert, E., S. Jiang, O. Elechi, M. Khondaker, & D. Baker. (2014). A preliminary study of gender differences in death penalty views of college students from Bangladesh, China,

Nigeria, and the United States. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, 12:44-68.

Q1. A notable gender gap exists in….....

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