research

Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty. (2018). Frank R. Baumgartner, Marty Davidson, Kaneesha R. Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin P. Wilson.

Deadly Justice is a comprehensive examination of the record established through 40 years of experience with the death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all existing death penalty laws in its landmark Furman v. Georgia (1972) decision. The Court was particularly concerned about the arbitrary and capricious administration of the penalty. Four years later in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) the Court approved a system with special guidelines to reduce or eliminate the problems earlier identified.

With chapters focusing on homicides, race and gender dynamics, aggravators and mitigators, geography, reversals, delays on death row, exonerations, methods of execution and botches, last-minute stays of execution, mental illness, public opinion, cost, deterrence, and evolving standards, the book offers a comprehensive overview of our nation’s modern experiment with capital punishment. At a time when other countries have abandoned judicial execution, the U.S. attempted to fix its own deeply flawed system.

The book’s empirical focus provides hard statistical evidence that not only has the modern system retained the vast majority of the issues that concerned the Justices in Furman, but several new problems have arisen as well: cost, botched lethal injections, decades of delay, geographic concentration in just a few jurisdictions, enormous rates of reversal, and last minute stays of execution. Thus, if anything, the modern death penalty not only fails the Furman test, but it scores even worse than the historical death penalty which was declared unconstitutional in 1972. Efforts to repair the system have failed.