NCJ Number
199336
Journal
Law & Society Review Volume: 36 Issue: 3 Dated: 2002 Pages: 549-576
Date Published
2002
Length
28 pages
Annotation
This article discusses how race has implications in death penalty judgments.
Abstract
Individuals’ racialized discourses of crime and criminals confirm taken-for-granted understandings. These understandings imply broader stories that are the wisdom of the majority and situational and historically specific (hegemonic). How identities are constituted in capital jurors’ stories of their life or death decisions has implications for understanding legal consciousness in death penalty judgments. This analysis drew on 66 jurors’ stories from 24 cases in which either a Black or white defendant was sentenced to death. The stories came from the Capital Jury Project, a national study of jury discretion in death penalty cases. Approximately 10 percent of the jurors were African- American. Results show that white jurors were found to employ cultural distance stories of individual responsibility, the tragic “Black” group, the “bad kid” and the “the caring family,” and “the threatening outsider.” In contrast, African-American jurors told stories of “culturally distant whites” and “resisting white racism.” Blacks clearly saw things differently than whites in death cases involving Black defendants. More-educated jurors were more sympathetic to the defendant and tended to tell stories that were closer in tone to those of their educated white counterparts. Less-educated working class Blacks were far less sympathetic and openly hostile to the white majority they perceived as utterly indifferent to the lives of African-Americans. Compared to previous research, this study points to a far more fluid perspective of the law as constituted by respondents’ multiple identities. A theory of legal narrativity states that it is through narrativity that one makes sense of the social world and social identities are constituted. 1 table, 12 footnotes, 42 references