NCJ Number
93185
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 8 Issue: 1/2 Dated: (June 1984) Pages: 31-51
Date Published
1984
Length
21 pages
Annotation
The practice of death qualification in capital cases excludes a large group of potential jurors, threatens the representativeness of the jury, and results in a group of jurors who have attitudes about crime control and due process different from those of individuals who were excluded.
Abstract
To evaluate the possibility that death-qualified juries may be biased against capital defendants, the demographic characteristics and attitudes toward the criminal justice system of people who would or would not be excluded by the Witherspoon standard were compared. A random sample of 811 eligible jurors in Alameda County (Calif.) were interviewed by telephone. Of the 717 respondents who stated that they could be fair and impartial in deciding on the guilt or innocence of a capital defendant, 17.2% said that they could never vote to impose the death penalty, and thus would be excludable under Witherspoon. Findings suggested that significantly greater proportions of blacks than whites and of females than males are eliminated by the process of death qualification. On the attitudinal measures, the death-qualified respondents were consistently more prone to favor the point of view of the prosecution, to mistrust criminal defendants, and their council, to take a punitive approach toward offenders, and to be more concerned with crime control than with due process. Eleven of the 13 items showed statistically significant differences. Footnotes, the research protocol, and a list of 20 references and 4 cases are included. (Author abstract)