A Culture that is Hard to Defend: Extralegal Factors in Defending Federal Death Penalty Cases

• In Event: Legal Services for the Indigent: Defense and Local Legal Culture

Abstract

This study examines the disparity in defense resources provided to federal capital defendants and in doing so expands our knowledge of location effects in the bulk of contemporary capital proceedings. We focus on federal cases at the midpoint of the modern federal death penalty and examine the role of local legal culture and the subcultural elements of the courtroom workgroup that lead to widely differential allocations of defense resources and which, in turn, are closely tied to disparate sentencing at trial. As such, we are able to assess the extent to which there is arbitrariness in what should be a standardized, nationwide adjudication process. Further, using defense resources as the dependent variable, and incorporating multiple measures for location effects in regression analyses, we can more accurately detect the extralegal roles of culture, geography, and courtroom workgroup characteristics in capital litigation.

Authors

• Jon Gould, American University

• Kenneth Sebastian Leon, George Washington University