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Chance and the Death Penalty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Richard A. Berk ,
Robert Weiss  and
Jack Boger
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Abstract

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We address capriciousness in decisions by prosecutors to charge homicide defendants with a capital crime. We suggest that it is useful to think of such decisions as a kind of lottery in which one should focus on the distribution of outcomes when considering both the nature of capriciousness and the degree of capriciousness. After our conceptional framework is introduced, we illustrate our ideas with the analysis of a data set from San Francisco.

Type
Symposium: Research on the Death Penalty
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , 1993 , pp. 89 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were given at the U.C.L.A. Marschak Colloquium, at the Neyman Seminar, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Statistics, and the August 1990 meetings of the American Statistical Association. We very much appreciate the thoughtful comments that were made at each. We are especially indebted to William Mason, David Freedman, and John Rolfe for a number of technical suggestions and to Anthony Amsterdam for help in our legal interpretations. The data were made available through the efforts of Michael Burt and Grace Suarez, from the Office of the Public Defender, San Francisco. Alec Campbell did much of the initial file construction. Weiss's work was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (grant MH37188-06).

References

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