The Dark at the Top of the Stairs: Four Destructive Influences of Capital Punishment on American Criminal Justice

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin E. Zimring ◽  
David T. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment

scholarly journals The Punitive Woman? Gender Differences in Public Attitudes Toward Parole Among an Australian Sample

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (10) ◽  
pp. 3006-3022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon Dodd
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Offender Rehabilitation ◽  
Neutral Position ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Australian Sample

Research exploring gender differences in public attitudes toward parole is limited, despite a large body of literature showing that men and women have diverging views on other criminal justice issues, including capital punishment and offender rehabilitation and treatment. Drawing on an Australian national survey of community views on parole, the current study examines whether men and women differ in their support for the release of prisoners on parole. The results indicate that gender does predict parole attitudes, with Australian women significantly more likely to hold nonsupportive views on parole than Australian men. The results also reveal that women are more likely to take a neutral position toward parole, rather than supporting it. Together, these findings indicate there may be something about being a woman in Australia that prevents one from being willing to support the early release of prisoners. The implications of these findings for future research are discussed.

The Influence of Latino Ethnicity on the Imposition of the Death Penalty

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 421-431
Author(s):  
Sheri Lynn Johnson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Related Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era

With respect to African Americans, the history of racial discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty is well-known, and the persistence of racial disparities in the modern era of capital punishment is well-documented. In contrast, the influence of Latino ethnicity on the imposition of the death penalty has been studied very little. A review of the limited literature reveals evidence of discrimination against Latinos. Archival studies generally find ethnicity-of-victim discrimination, and some of those studies find ethnicity-of-defendant discrimination disadvantaging Latino defendants; these findings parallel the findings of the much more robust literature investigating bias against African American defendants and victims. The controlled experimental studies generally show both ethnicity-of-defendant and ethnicity-of-victim discrimination disadvantaging Latinos. Related literature investigating stereotypes, animosity, and discrimination in other criminal justice decisions further suggests the likelihood of ethnicity discrimination in the imposition of capital punishment, as well as the need for further research.

The Execution of Wallace Wilkerson

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Acker ◽  
Ryan Champagne
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
Firing Squad ◽  
Lethal Injection ◽  
The U.S

Wallace Wilkerson was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1879 after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of his sentence. Shots from the marksmen’s rifles missed his heart. Not strapped into the chair where he had been seated, Wilkerson lurched onto the ground and exclaimed, “My God!…They missed it!” He groaned, continued breathing, and was pronounced dead some 27 min later. Relying on contemporaneous news accounts and legal documents, this article describes Wilkerson’s crime, the judicial decisions upholding his death sentence, and his execution. It next examines ensuing methods of capital punishment from the electric chair through lethal injection and notes persistent gaps between principle and practice in the continuing quest for increasingly humane modes of execution. The article concludes by suggesting that Wilkerson’s botched firing squad execution harbingered difficulties which continue to plague capital punishment. The implications for the future of the death penalty—a long-standing and resilient practice in American criminal justice—and the ultimate legacy of Wallace Wilkerson remain uncertain, although starkly evident is the daunting and perhaps impossible challenge of reconciling the paradox inherent in the concept of a “humane execution.”

Attribution, Salience, and Attitudes toward Criminal Sanctioning

1985 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANCIS T. CULLEN ◽  
GREGORY A. CLARK ◽  
JOHN B. CULLEN ◽  
RICHARD A. MATHERS
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
White Collar Crime ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Attributional Processes ◽  
The Way

Building upon the work of Stinchcombe, Taylor et al., the present research attempts to assess the impact of victimization, salience, and attribution on four measures of criminal sanctioning: general punishment, rehabilitation, capital punishment, and the punishment of white-collar crime. Utilizing a sample drawn from Galesburg, Illinois, our analysis revealed that attitudes were not significantly influenced by being a victim or by crime salience. In contrast, our measure of attribution (what a person “attributed” the cause of crime to) had consistent effects across the scales, with those having a positivist orientation being less punitive and more in favor of rehabilitation. When members of criminal justice related occupations were included in the analysis, these results generally continued to persist. These findings thus suggest that attributional processes and, in particular, the way in which people explain crime may be important determinants of the attitudes that those both inside and outside the criminal justice system hold toward sanctioning policy.

scholarly journals Litigating in the Shadow of Innocence

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Supreme Court

In 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States, allowing optimism to trump experience, accepted various states’ assurances that new death penalty procedures the states had then recently adopted would avoid the vices that had led the Court to strike down the death penalty in 1972. Now, some thirty years later, a body of evidence has developed demonstrating that this experiment has failed—that the problems of arbitrariness, racism and propensity to error are endemic to the criminal justice system (particularly with regard to capital punishment) and cannot be cured by what Justice Blackmun called “tinker[ing] with the machinery of death.” Despite the Court’s best intentions, the death penalty procedures of the 1980s and 1990s and the first half of this decade reflect little if any significant improvement over the condemned pre-1972 systems.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Amy Louise Wood ◽  
Natalie J. Ring
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Penal System ◽  
The South ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jim Crow South

The introduction outlines the central themes of this collection: the problem of southern distinctiveness; the modernization of the criminal justice system and the centralization of state power; and the relationship between crime control and white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it offers an overview of criminal justice history in the South from the antebellum era through the rise and decline of convict leasing in the postbellum era to the development of new practices surrounding policing, incarceration, and capital punishment after 1890. It also explains the significance of this collection to the historiography on criminal justice in the South, as well as to understanding problems in our present-day penal system. Finally, the introduction summarizes each chapter in the collection.

Neurointerventions and Physician Participation

2019 ◽  
pp. 137-164
Author(s):  
Jesper Ryberg
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Crime Prevention ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
Physician Participation ◽  
Lethal Injection ◽  
Medical Involvement

This chapter takes up an issue that more narrowly relates to the question who should administer the use of neurointerventions if such treatment were to be put into practice. That such treatment would usually require at least some degree of involvement by personnel with medical skills is beyond doubt. However, this raises the question whether physicians should be involved in the treatment of offenders. The purpose of this chapter is to consider whether the combination of the fact that the treatment presupposes medical involvement, and the view that physicians should not be involved in such treatment, is sufficient to block the whole discussion of the morally legitimate use of neurointerventions in crime prevention. It is examined whether any of the arguments that have been advanced in the discussion of physician involvement in the use of lethal injection in relation to capital punishment manage to establish that physicians have a moral duty to abstain from criminal justice use of treatment by neurointerventions.

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