Criminological Research and the Death Penalty: Has Research by Criminologists Impacted Capital Punishment Practices?

American Journal of Criminal Justice - At the request of the SCJA president this paper addresses five questions. Does criminological research make a difference relative to the death penalty? - If...     

What Executioners Can—and Cannot—Teach Us About the Death Penalty

Those who work with the condemned often come to reject the death penalty not only in individual cases, and not only on the ground that it is poorly implemented. They tend to conclude that the punishment is wrong. I argue that the perspective of the executioner helps illuminate the debate about whether to abolish capital punishment, and that indeed the perspective of those who work with the condemned raises the troubling possibility that support for the death penalty can survive only at a great remove. Jeffrie Murphy has also argued that the executioner’s perspective can be useful, but I contend that Murphy asks the wrong question. His essay considers whether an executioner may, under some circumstances, take pride in his work. The better question is whether anyone ought to be asked to do such work. On this latter question, the perspective of the executioner sheds important light. Like Murphy, I draw on works by and about Albert Pierrepoint, the “last hangman” of Britain. I also draw on the perspectives of numerous executioners, wardens, chaplains, and other death row personnel. I argue that their perspectives offer a powerful argument against the main rationale for the death penalty: retribution. If retribution is keyed to the offender’s character as well as his wrongful act, then post-conviction character ought to matter. The executioners’ accounts share a common theme: that death row inmates change over time and hold the potential for redemption.     

“Knowledge and Death Penalty Opinion: The Marshall Hypotheses Revisited.”

This study tests the three hypotheses derived from the written opinion of Justice Thurgood Marshall in Furman v Georgia in 1972. Subjects completed questionnaires at the beginning and the end of the fall a semester. Experimental group subjects were enrolled in a death penalty class, while control group subjects were enrolled in another criminal justice class. The death penalty class was the experimental stimulus. Findings provided strong support for the first and third hypotheses, i.e., subjects were generally lacking in death penalty knowledge before the experimental stimulus, and death penalty proponents who scored “high” on a retribution index did not change their death penalty opinions despite exposure to death penalty knowledge. Marshall’s second hypothesis--that death penalty knowledge and death penalty support were inversely related--was not supported by the data. Two unexpected findings were that death penalty proponents who scored “low” on a retribution index also did not change their death penalty opinions after becoming more informed about the subject, and that death penalty knowledge did not alter subjects’ initial retributive positions. Suggestions for future research are provided.     

Dr. Death? Professionalism,Virtue, and U.S. Physician Participation in the Death Penalty

In the United States at present, the death penalty is a possible sentence in 31 out of 50 states, as well as within the military and for federal cases. In the U.S., numbers of executions are declining, in part due to moratoriums in place and challenges to execution by lethal injection. Participation by physicians in lethal injection executions has been steadfastly viewed by professional medical organizations as contrary to their ethical standards. However, physicians have participated in lethal injection executions, and the morality of the death penalty itself is a matter of intense social and political debate. Medical ethics commentators and professional organizations have typically held that the prohibition on physician participation in the death penalty is independent of the ethical status of the death penalty itself. This article argues that this view is untenable, and that it is tied to a view of professional role virtue that is similarly untenable. At the same time, it argues that, given the morally uncertain status of the death penalty, it is plausible that virtuous physicians may either refuse or choose to participate in some aspects of the death penalty.     

The Jolly Hangman, the Jailed Journalist, and the Decline of Singapore’s Death Penalty

British journalist Alan Shadrake was convicted of contempt of court in 2010 for writing a book about capital punishment in Singapore. This article uses that book and other sources to analyze four aspects of Singapore’s death penalty. It begins with a profile of Darshan Singh, the hangman who executed 1,000 persons over the past half-century. The article then shows that Singapore’s system of mandatory capital punishment does not produce consistency in death penalty decision-making. Next the article argues that the prosecution of Shadrake increased criticism of capital punishment in Singapore by propelling his book to bestseller status. This is followed by an explanation of why the number of persons executed in Singapore has declined in recent years, from an average of 66 per year in the mid-1990s to an average of 5 per year since 2004. The key proximate cause of this decline appears to be prosecutors, who can use their discretion to charge defendants for possessing amounts of heroin, cannabis, cocaine, and methamphetamine that are just under the thresholds for a mandatory death sentence. Capital punishment in Singapore is not really mandatory, and it cannot escape the problems of bias and arbitrariness that have long plagued discretionary death penalty systems in the United States, Japan, and other nations.     

How Strong Is Public Support for the Death Penalty in Singapore?

Singapore is well known internationally for its uncompromising stance towards law and order and its use of the death penalty in particular for murder and drug trafficking. Until 2012, it was one of the few countries in the world where the death penalty was mandatory for persons convicted of these two crimes. The law was amended in 2012 to give a judge the choice to impose the death penalty or life imprisonment (with caning) for non-intentional murder and drug trafficking in some situations. What do Singaporeans think of the use of the death penalty in their own country? This article reports on some findings of a survey conducted in 2016 on 1500 Singaporeans to assess their knowledge and support of the death penalty.     

Buster,Maranzano and the Castellammare War, 1930–1931

More than most issues surrounding the American Mafia, the history of the Castellammare War is contestable at both theoretical and empirical levels. As the alleged pivotal event in the creation of the contemporary structure of the US Mafia or Cosa Nostra, it is of obvious importance as a topic of historical investigation. But a survey of published works on the War and its consequences reveals confusion, inaccuracies, erroneous assumptions and missing information. This is the first major systematic attempt to explore the War and its consequences made since the 1970s. Aside from adding substantially to the stock of knowledge of the War and its participants, debates on the War are critically evaluated, using original source materials where possible. The Castellammare War did not have the ramifications assumed, when placed either in a broader context or from the vantage point of internal American Mafia dynamics.     

Juridification: Disrupting the Relationship between Law and Politics?

The article addresses some possible implications of juridification in the society. The concept of juridification is unclear, and the empirical knowledge of the social implications of various processes of juridification is weak. We argue that clear‐cut conclusions about the implications of such processes cannot be drawn. To address questions of implications of juridification processes, we focus on the relationship between law and politics. An analytical framework for the analysis of juridification processes is introduced to manage the vast implications of these processes. The discussion indicates complexity and contradictory outcomes of juridification processes. We conclude that to understand the vast complexity of the different kinds of juridification processes, we need more empirical studies from a range of academic fields, including law, economics and political sciences, and that researchers in these fields need to take a step back to get a more satisfactory analytical point of departure for such studies.     

Kairós and Clinamen: Revolutionary Politics and the Common Good

This article sets out to offer a new reconceptualisation of the common good as the mechanism providing the temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics. The first section investigates the pairing of commonality and goodness, revealing its nature as a synthesis of apparently irreconcilable opposites. The second section examines how this irreconcilability is overcome, advancing the argument that to heal the divide, a double movement of definition and concealment is necessary, whereby the process of definition of what constitutes the common good is accompanied by an expropriation, or hollowing out, of meaning. The third section offers a proposal for overcoming this epistemological impasse about the nature of the common good, by contrasting chronos and kairós, chronological time and what in English can be translated as ‘opportune time’, and offering kairós as the chance to create, within the fissures of the totalitarianism of chronological time, the timescape for revolutionary politics. This proposal is carried on in the second part of this article, starting with ‘ Chronos and Kairós ’ section, where the concept of kairós is expanded upon and coupled with the Epicurean and Lucretian idea of the clinamen, the swerve of the atoms that introduces the element of chance against Democritean determinism. With the support of Antonio Negri’s reading of kairós and clinamen, the article argues in ‘Alma Venus: Love, Desire and Revolution’ section that these two concepts provide the spatial and temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics, in tension and critical engagement with Ackerman’s idea of constitutional moments, to conclude in ‘Conclusions: Kairós and Revolutionary Politics’ section, that the common good is to be defined as that which takes place and is identified/identifiable within these coordinates.     

Public health and the development of infant mortality in Germany, 1875–1930

The substantial increase in life expectancy over the past 150 years can largely be attributed to a drastic decline in infant mortality. In the continuing debate about the reasons for this development, recent research has focused attention on the role of public health. Since the 1870s in Germany, municipal and national public health strategies were launched. One major element of this policy was the fight against high infant mortality rates in urban areas. The establishment of municipal milk supplies and the creation of infant welfare centers attacked gastrointestinal disorders, the predominant cause of death among infants. This article investigates these developments in the largest German cities, particularly Düsseldorf, which is located in one of the most industrialized regions.     

Racist Offenders and the Politics of ‘Hate Crime’

In the UK and USA ‘Hate crime’ has become a topic of public controversy and social mobilization around issues of violence and harassment. This has largely but not exclusively addressed racism, homophobia and gender based violence. This article has three objectives. First, to situate hate crime legislation within a broad theory of modernity;secondly to examine the politics of its emergence as a public issue; thirdly to use data from the authors' recent research in Greater Manchester to illuminate the complexity of the concept of ‘hate crime’. The centrality of ‘hate crime’ to current debates derives from the importance of rights-based regulation of complex societies and the juridical management of emotional life. Hatred and violence have become problematic behaviour thrown into relief by a long term civilizing process. Hate crimes have thus acquired powerful rhetorical focus for mobilization of victim and identity politics. With reference to racist violence in Oldham and elsewhere in Greater Manchester, we argue that in its application and construction, however, ‘hate crime’ is a complex phenomenon that might dramatize rather than regulate the problems it seeks to address. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Does the Threat of the Death Penalty Affect Plea Bargaining in Murder Cases? Evidence from New York's 1995 Reinstatement of Capital Punishment

This article investigates whether the death penalty encouragesdefendants charged with potentially capital crimes to pleadguilty in exchange for lesser sentences. I exploit a naturalexperiment in New York State: the 1995 reinstatement of capitalpunishment, coupled with the public refusal of some prosecutorsto pursue death sentences (N.Y. Penal Law 125.25 [McKinney1975]). Using individual-level data on all felony arrests inthe state between 1985 and 1998, I find the death penalty leadsdefendants to accept plea bargains with harsher terms, but doesnot increase defendants’ overall propensity to plead guilty.A differences-in-differences analysis of a national cross-sectionof homicide defendants confirms these results.     

Through the meshes of patriarchy:: The Male/Female Relationship in the Saguenay Peasant Society (1860–1930)

This article offers an analysis of women's life and status within the peasant family of the Saguenay region (Quebec) prior to the completion of the settlement process. After a brief survey of the literature in the field, a variety of sources (including several bodies of oral data) is analyzed, offering the conclusions that: (1) it is useful to carefully distinguish between the macro-social or societal level (State, Church, capital …) and the micro-social sphere of the family and the conjugal couple; (2) the societal scale was made up of unambiguously patriarchal powers, norms, and institutions, whereas at the micro-social level, the reality was much more complex and offered a great deal of diversity; (3) societal constraints heavily influenced the conjugal relationship but not in a deterministic way. The latter remained a social area where the women, somehow, remained able to maneuver, to negotiate and to assert themselves; (4) the same can be said of the thesis that male ownership and control of the means of production necessarily entailed subordination and proletarianization of the married women; and (5) it would be fruitful to explore the idea that male domination was mostly rooted and secured not in the family but in the societal arena.     

Crime and punishment in the soviet union and the united states: 1986–19901

A relatively recent development in the comparative criminology literature concerns cross‐national comparisons of criminal sentencing practices (e.g., Lynch, 1993). While there are now several studies comparing sentencing practices and lengths, there is a particular shortage of studies that examine the disposition of serious criminal cases through several stages of the criminal justice process. Specifically, there is a shortage of information concerning this issue in Russia and the former Soviet Union. To address this limitation, we present data on the police and court disposition of violent criminal cases in the former Soviet Union during the period of 1986 to 1990. For comparative purposes, comparable data from recent studies of criminal case dispositions in the United States are presented. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Catalyst or Cause? Legislation and the Demise of Machine Politics in Britain and the United States

In the nineteenth century, British and American parties competed by hiring electoral agents to bribe and treat voters. British parties abruptly abandoned this practice in the 1880s. The conventional explanation is that legislation put an end to agent‐mediated distribution. But this explanation leaves many questions unanswered. Why did the parties use agents for decades, even though they imposed great expense on candidates and were viewed as untrustworthy? And why, after decades of half‐hearted reforms, did the House of Commons pass effective antibribery reforms only in 1883? In our formal model, parties hire agents to solve information problems, but agent‐mediated distribution can be collectively suboptimal. Legislation can serve as a credibility device for shifting to less costly strategies.     

“Behave Like Enraged Lions”: Civil Militias,the Army and the Criminalisation of Politics in Indonesia

Since the end of the authoritarian New Order regime in May 1998, Indonesia has embarked upon a difficult journey towards democracy. One of the key questions raised by the rise of social and political violence in both Java and the Outer Islands since President Suharto's resignation from power is that of the wearing away of the state's monopoly of the means of violence and of its legitimate uses. But the process of the criminalisation of both state agencies and political parties is much older than one would have it. It begun during the late colonial period and gained momentum during the war of independence, in the late 1940s, when army units had to engage in extortion and smuggling to cater for soldiers' needs. Under the New Order, this beam of relationships between the police, the army and criminal gangs was given an official recognition of some sort, hence quasi-legal protection, through the creation of the “System for the Protection of the Environment” (Siskamling). This “system” enabled many petty criminals from the red light districts to join civil and para-military militias and even, at times, to enter public administration. Post-Suharto Indonesia inherited these criminalised “grey areas” between state agencies and the underworld, where one would find numerous masters of violence – people for whom violence is both a way of life and a way of making a living.