Post by MXB on Jun 4, 2006 8:09:04 GMT -5
June 2, 2006
Study finds race matters in death penalty
By Allison Dedrick, Stanford Daily
Race still plays a large role in swaying the death sentence, according to
the findings of Jennifer Eberhardt, an associate professor of psychology
at Stanford. In a study featured in the Journal of Psychological Science
this May, Eberhardt demonstrated how in cases where a black defendant is
against a white victim, those that look stereotypically more black were
more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death.
“This study shows race may still matter in criminal justice in ways we
aren’t aware of,” Eberhardt said.
Examining how stereotypes work within one racial category, the study is a
breakaway from the traditional line of cross-group race studies.
The research team used a database prepared by David Baldus containing over
600 death penalty-eligible cases from Philadelphia between 1979 and 1999,
44 of which involved a black defendant and a white victim. The team
compiled head and neck shots of each of the black defendants and showed
them to a group of Stanford undergraduates. Students were asked to rate
the “stereotypicality,” or stereotypical blackness, of each photo on a
scale from 1 to 11. They were allowed to make their own judgments of a
stereotypically black appearance, which in past studies has been found to
include features such as dark skin, a wide nose and thick lips.
The database also included hundreds of cases involving a black defendant
and a black victim, so Eberhardt and her team selected 118 cases and
repeated the aforementioned procedure. While cases with a white victim
proved twice as disadvantageous for stereotypically more black defendants,
in cases where both victim and defendant were black, racial appearance had
a much less significant correlation to the sentence.
In past studies, Eberhardt has investigated the varying degrees of
prejudice toward blacks and determined that the more stereotypically black
a person looks, the more prejudice they receive and the more likely they
are to be perceived as criminal. Additionally, she had been looking at
literature exploring the importance of the race of the victim in death
penalty cases.
However, Eberhardt admitted that the data set used was neither very large
nor well-represented geographically. Currently, she is continuing her
research by trying to look at other databases from different regions of
the United States to see if the trend holds across the nation.
There was also not enough information in the Baldus database to
investigate cases where the defendant and the victim were both white, but
Eberhardt is also working on this issue.
“We are at a point where we are tying to reexamine the death penalty and
it is helpful to have this information about how the death penalty is
actually administered,” she said. “If there are factors involved that
shouldn’t be there, we need to know about them.”
---
Source : Stanford Daily
daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=20753&repository=0001_article#
Study finds race matters in death penalty
By Allison Dedrick, Stanford Daily
Race still plays a large role in swaying the death sentence, according to
the findings of Jennifer Eberhardt, an associate professor of psychology
at Stanford. In a study featured in the Journal of Psychological Science
this May, Eberhardt demonstrated how in cases where a black defendant is
against a white victim, those that look stereotypically more black were
more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death.
“This study shows race may still matter in criminal justice in ways we
aren’t aware of,” Eberhardt said.
Examining how stereotypes work within one racial category, the study is a
breakaway from the traditional line of cross-group race studies.
The research team used a database prepared by David Baldus containing over
600 death penalty-eligible cases from Philadelphia between 1979 and 1999,
44 of which involved a black defendant and a white victim. The team
compiled head and neck shots of each of the black defendants and showed
them to a group of Stanford undergraduates. Students were asked to rate
the “stereotypicality,” or stereotypical blackness, of each photo on a
scale from 1 to 11. They were allowed to make their own judgments of a
stereotypically black appearance, which in past studies has been found to
include features such as dark skin, a wide nose and thick lips.
The database also included hundreds of cases involving a black defendant
and a black victim, so Eberhardt and her team selected 118 cases and
repeated the aforementioned procedure. While cases with a white victim
proved twice as disadvantageous for stereotypically more black defendants,
in cases where both victim and defendant were black, racial appearance had
a much less significant correlation to the sentence.
In past studies, Eberhardt has investigated the varying degrees of
prejudice toward blacks and determined that the more stereotypically black
a person looks, the more prejudice they receive and the more likely they
are to be perceived as criminal. Additionally, she had been looking at
literature exploring the importance of the race of the victim in death
penalty cases.
However, Eberhardt admitted that the data set used was neither very large
nor well-represented geographically. Currently, she is continuing her
research by trying to look at other databases from different regions of
the United States to see if the trend holds across the nation.
There was also not enough information in the Baldus database to
investigate cases where the defendant and the victim were both white, but
Eberhardt is also working on this issue.
“We are at a point where we are tying to reexamine the death penalty and
it is helpful to have this information about how the death penalty is
actually administered,” she said. “If there are factors involved that
shouldn’t be there, we need to know about them.”
---
Source : Stanford Daily
daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=20753&repository=0001_article#