Book

Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (2018; Oxford University Press) is a comprehensive examination of the record established through 40 years of experience with the “new and improved” death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all existing death penalty laws in its landmark Furman v. Georgia decision. The Court was particularly concerned about the arbitrary and capricious administration of the penalty. Four years later in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) the Court approved a system with special guidelines to reduce or eliminate the problems earlier identified. The book poses a simple question: Has the modern system worked as intended? Have the states successfully targeted only a narrow class of particularly heinous crimes and the most deserving criminals for the ultimate punishment, or do various elements of caprice, bias, and arbitrariness continue to make the application of the death penalty akin to “being struck by lightning” as the Court noted in Furman?

We bring empirical evidence to answer this question. Not only has the modern system retained the vast majority of the issues that concerned the Justices in Furman, but several new problems have arisen as well: cost, botched lethal injections, decades of delay, geographic concentration in just a few jurisdictions, enormous rates of reversal, and last minute stays of execution.

Our work was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Justice Stephen Breyer's dissenting opinion for the case Jordan v Mississippi (17-753, 2018).

The book is used now to help teach Poli 203: Race, Innocence and the End of the Death Penalty at UNC-Chapel Hill.

For replication data, check here. And for reviews of the book, check here.