Capital Trial, Analyzed as Mitigating Weight and Counterweight to Jurors' Premature Decisions and Pro-Death Bias

• In Event: Death Penalty Public Opinion & Education

Abstract

This study compares 12 multi-state life and death capital cases where evidence of the defendants’ mental or cognitive disorders, addiction and childhood abuse history were predominant themes at trial, in order to assess the jurors’ receptivity to mental mitigating evidence. The cases confirm theories which have been suggested by Capital Jury Project scholars that jurors engage in arbitrary decision making, premature and automatic death penalty decisions, speculate about parole and are guided by extralegal racial considerations. This study goes one step further to suggest that these errors in decision making can skew death decisions by distracting hold out jurors from considering and giving effect to the mitigation evidence. Some jurors may be more inclined than others to be distracted by arbitrary factors because they focus more on the retributive aspects of the case, the severity of the injury, rather than on defendant’s culpability. Threshold errors like premature and automatic death decision- making, and extra-legal considerations about parole and race may drive the majority of jurors to persuade the holdouts to join in a death verdict. These errors may stifle moral considerations of mitigating evidence at deliberations, and they serve as a “counterweight “ to the proper weighing of the evidence.

Author

• Leona Deborah Jochnowitz, University at Albany, SUNY