Due process vs. crime control: Death qualification and jury attitudes.

Abstract

Juries that exclude people who are unwilling to impose the death penalty (death-qualified juries) may be biased against capital defendants. To evaluate this possibility we compared the demographic characteristics and attitudes toward the criminal justice system of people who would or would not be excluded by the Witherspoon standard. A random sample of 811 eligible jurors in Alameda County, Calitbrnia were interviewed by telephone. Of the 717 respondents who stated that they could be fair and impartial in deciding on the guilt or innocence of a capital defendant, 17.2% said that they could never vote to impose the death penalty, and thus are excludable under Witherspoon. Significantly greater proportions of blacks than whites and of females than males are eliminated by the process of death qualification. On the attitudinal measures, the death-qualified respondents were consistently more prone to favor the point of view of the prosecution, to mistrust criminal defendants and their counsel, to take a punitive approach toward offenders, and to be more concerned with crime control than with due process. Eleven of the 13 items showed statistically significant differences. *This research was supported in part by a grant from the Veatch Program of the North Shore Unitarian Society. We are also grateful to the lawyers and professors who helped us with the wording of the Witherspoon and nullification questions, and to Judy Small, who read and commented on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Requests for reprints should be sent to the second author.

Some steps between attitudes and verdicts

“…Specifically, a person who opposes the death penalty is likely to exhibit other attitudes that are associated with an emphasis on due process guarantees in the criminal justice system. For example, in comparison to people who oppose the death penalty, people who favor capital punishment tend to be more concerned about high levels of violent crime, to exhibit less sympathy for criminal defendants, to be more suspicious of defense attorneys, and to exhibit more favorable attitudes toward prosecuting attorneys and the police (Bronson, 1970;Fitzgerald & Ellsworth, 1984;Tyler & Weber, 1982;Vidmar & Ellsworth, 1974). It has been argued (Ellsworth & Ross, 1983;Tyler & Weber, 1982) that attitudes toward the death penalty are an especially pure example of "symbolic attitudes" (Sears & Kinder, 1971), emotionally based attitudes that serve to express a person's ideological self-image -as a practical person who takes a no-nonsense approach to crime or as a champion of the individual against the mistakes and prejudices of the state.…”

The role of death qualification in venirepersons' evaluations of aggravating and mitigating circumstances in capital trials

“…Other studies have shown that death qualification excludes certain demographic and attitudinal subgroups from capital jury service, which results in juries that are less representative, and, consequently, more biased (Hans, 1986;Moran & Comfort, 1986). In addition, death-qualified jurors are more likely to be pro-prosecution, and, consequently, pro-conviction than their excludable counterparts Fitzgerald & Ellsworth, 1984;Thompson et al, 1984).…”

“…In addition, death-qualified jurors, when compared to their excludable counterparts, were more likely to favor the arguments made by the prosecution, mistrust defendants and defense attorneys, endorse a punitive approach toward offenders, place more importance on crime control than due process, and express less regret concerning erroneous convictions and more regret concerning erroneous acquittals (Fitzgerald & Ellsworth, 1984;Thompson, Cowan, Ellsworth, & Harrington, 1984).…”

“…However, several studies found that this standard is problematic in its violation of a defendant's right to both due process and a jury of one's peers. For example, Fitzgerald and Ellsworth (1984) found that, under Witherspoon, significantly greater numbers of Blacks and women would be excluded from sitting on capital juries.…”

Intersections of race, ethnicity, and the law.

“…Yet, a review of Law and Human Behavior's back issues uncovered only a handful of articles directly pertaining to race or ethnicity, most of them in a special issue on discrimination edited by sociologist John Hagan in 1985. Race has been studied along with other factors in the perennial psychology-law topics of eyewitness identification (Brigham, 1980;Brigham & Ready, 1985) and jury decision making (Fitzgerald & Ellsworth, 1984;Hans & Vidmar, 1986). But systematic analysis of race and ethnicity appears to be more common in other social scientific approaches to law, and even in other subfields of psychology, than in psychology and law.…”