NCJ Number
105767
Date Published
1987
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This paper both defends and criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Georgia (1987), in which the Court rejected the conclusion of a statistical study by David Baldus et al. that there is a systematic bias in Georgia death penalty decisions according to murder victims' race (Those who murder whites are more likely to receive the death penalty than those who murder blacks).
Abstract
The Court did not accept the validity of the Baldus study as critics of the decision have claimed. The majority accepted the validity of the statistics, but questioned that the statistics proved systemic racial discrimination by murder victim in death penalty sentencing. The Court should have grappled with the evidence presented in Baldus as a central issue in the case, but instead the Court sidestepped the issue of systemic bias in capital sentencing by stating that an overturning of McCleskey's sentencing would require evidence of direct racial discrimination in McCleskey's case. This contradicts prior Court decisions and establishes a difficult evidential burden. The Court majority was apparently interested in closing the door on other death penalty challenges based on disparity in outcome by race or some other illegitimate factor. On the other hand, there are grounds for rejecting the conclusions of the Baldus study had it been directly confronted by the Court. Among them are the study's failure to include controls for the race of case decisionmakers, the victims' social class, and the possible bias of the researcher. The study also fails to detail the mechanisms whereby there is racial discrimination in death penalty sentencing according to victims' race without discrimination according to the defendant's race.