Devaluing Death: An Empirical Study of Implicit Racial Bias on Jury-Eligible Citizens in Six Death Penalty States

65 Pages Posted: 10 Aug 2013

See all articles by Justin D. Levinson

Justin D. Levinson

University of Hawaii at Manoa - William S. Richardson School of Law

Robert J. Smith

Harvard Law School (Fair Punishment Project, a joint initiative of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute & Criminal Justice Institute)

Danielle Young

University of Hawaii at Manoa - Department of Psychology

Date Written: February 19, 2013

Abstract

Stark racial disparities define America’s relationship with the death penalty. Though commentators have scrutinized a range of possible causes for this uneven racial distribution of death sentences, no convincing evidence suggests that any one of these factors consistently account for the unjustified racial disparities at play in the administration of capital punishment. We propose that a unifying current running through each of these partial plausible explanations is the notion that the human mind may unwittingly contribute bias into the seemingly neutral concepts and processes of death penalty administration.

To test the effects of implicit bias on the death penalty, we conducted a study on 445 jury eligible citizens in six leading death penalty states. We found that jury eligible citizens harbored the two different kinds of implicit racial bias we tested: implicit racial stereotypes about Blacks and Whites generally, as well as implicit associations between race and the value of life. We also found that death qualified jurors, those that expressed a willingness to consider imposing both a life sentence and a death sentence, harbored stronger implicit and self-reported (explicit) racial biases than excluded jurors. The results of the study underscore the potentially powerful role of implicit bias and suggest that racial disparities in the modern death penalty could be linked to the very concepts entrusted to maintain the continued constitutionality of capital punishment: its retributive core, its empowerment of juries to express the cultural consensus of local communities, and the modern regulatory measures that promised to eliminate arbitrary death sentencing.

Keywords: implicit racial bias, race of victim effect, death penalty, capital punishment, racial disparities, empirical study

Suggested Citation

Levinson, Justin D. and Smith, Robert J. and Young, Danielle, Devaluing Death: An Empirical Study of Implicit Racial Bias on Jury-Eligible Citizens in Six Death Penalty States (February 19, 2013). New York University Law Review, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2307719

Justin D. Levinson (Contact Author)

University of Hawaii at Manoa - William S. Richardson School of Law ( email )

2515 Dole Street
Honolulu, HI 96822-2350
United States

Robert J. Smith

Harvard Law School (Fair Punishment Project, a joint initiative of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute & Criminal Justice Institute) ( email )

Cambridge, MA
United States

Danielle Young

University of Hawaii at Manoa - Department of Psychology ( email )

United States

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