Contact: Elizabeth Stasny, (614) 292-0784
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457
JURORS OPPOSED TO THE DEATH PENALTY ACT DIFFERENTLY FROM OTHERS
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- By law, people who are opposed to the death penalty are prohibited from serving on juries in which a defendant may be sentenced to death.
But a new study suggests that excluding anti-death-penalty jurors may be biasing the juries who determine the guilt or innocence of defendants. It is not possible, however, to tell whether this bias would favor defendants or prosecutors.
"We found that jurors who are against the death penalty act differently from other jurors," said Elizabeth Stasny, co- author of the study and associate professor of statistics at Ohio State University.
"However, in an actual death-penalty trial, we can't say for sure in which direction these differences would affect the outcome."
In general, the study found that jurors against the death penalty were harsher on defendants than those who favored the death penalty. However, the effects differed greatly depending on the crime the defendant was charged with, Stasny said.
Stasny conducted the study with Joseph Kadane, professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Kathleen Fritsch, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Tennessee at Martin. The results were published in the June 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
The researchers compared how jurors opposed to capital punishment and those in favor of capital punishment acted in 57 trials in Wake County, North Carolina from October 1984 to June 1986. None of these trials were death penalty cases.
"Because people who are opposed to the death penalty are not allowed to serve in capital cases, we can't observe directly how they act in those cases," Stasny said. "Instead, we looked at how anti-death-penalty jurors act in other kinds of trials to see how they might be different."
At the completion of each trial, the jurors were asked to complete a questionnaire that asked, among other things, for their first-ballot vote on the guilt or innocence of the defendant. They were later contacted by phone and asked for their views on the death penalty. The study included 298 former jurors.
In 23 of the trials included in the study, the defendant was charged with drunk driving (DWI). Because DWI was the charge in so many cases, the researchers divided the trials into DWI and non-DWI cases.
The results showed that jurors opposed to the death penalty were much more likely to vote to convict in DWI cases than were other jurors. "This was a surprise," Stasny said. "We expected those against the death penalty to react more favorably toward the defendants."
In the non-DWI cases, anti-death-penalty jurors were slightly more likely to vote for conviction, but the effect was much weaker than in the DWI cases.
"The important message of this analysis is that excluding jurors who are opposed to the death penalty seems to have different effects for different trials," Stasny said.
"We saw differences between DWI and non-DWI trials. We would expect differences, possibly even greater, in trials for which the death penalty is a possible sentence."
Stasny said that, as a statistician, she can't explain the sociological or psychological reasons why jurors against the death penalty may be harder on defendants in certain kinds of cases. But the results suggest that these differences may be important in determining the outcomes of trials.
"If we really want to have a jury of our peers, it doesn't seem that we can get that by excluding people who are opposed to the death penalty," she said.
The study was partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
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