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Folk Knowledge as Legal Action: Death Penalty Judgments and the Tenet of Early Release in a Culture of Mistrust and Punitiveness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Benjamin D. Steiner ,
William J. Bowers  and
Austin Sarat
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Abstract

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This article traces interconnections between folk knowledge—the everyday, taken-for-granted understandings and beliefs that shape people's perceptions, actions, and reactions to events and situations—and legal action. It examines the consciousness of crime and punishment as that consciousness comes to bear when citizens are given the responsibility for the life or death decision made by jurors in capital cases. It seeks to identify the sources of both general and specific folk knowledge about the release of convicted capital murderers not sentenced to death and to elucidate the construction and concentration of such knowledge. One state—Georgia—where folk knowledge of early release is distinctively concentrated and different from other states serves as a strategic site for the analysis. Using Capital Jury Project (CJP) data from 3-4-hour interviews with 916 jurors in 11 states, we show that it is jurors' specific release estimates that influence their capital sentencing decisions, and we explore how folk knowledge figures in jury deliberations, despite court admonitions that such considerations are not to play a role.

Type
Professional and Popular Conceptions of Criminal Responsibility
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , 1999 , pp. 461 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Support for this research was provided by a grant from the Law and Social Sciences Program of the National Science Foundation, grant NSF SES-9013252. We are grateful for the helpful comments of Patricia Ewick and Stuart Scheingold on an earlier version of this article.

References

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