CrimePsych

I used to be all for the death penalty – i figured that the legal system did such a great job that never in my wildest dreams would innocent people be sent to prison, let alone be sentenced to death. Naive, i know, but i was young, misinformed and maybe even in a little bit of denial? But these days, although i’m still happy to see certain offenders ‘get whats coming to them’ i’m a lot more cautious. Cases such as the highly controversial ‘West Memphis Three’ as well as other cases i’ve read about over the past few years where death row inmates have been exonerated after years on death row have made me start questioning the criminal justice systems effectiveness for extraditing the truth.

Nonetheless, having done research on racial profiling in the past, i am somewhat relieved to see (at least based on the statistics/papers i have viewed) that no such racial bias exists when it comes to defendants sentenced to capital punishment.

For instance, of the 340 prisoners on death row in Texas, (330 males, 10 females) 30.9% of them are Caucasian, 38.8% of them are classed as being Black, 29.1% are classed as Hispanic, with the final 1.2% being classed as ‘Other’. While there are obviously differences across this range of persons in their race the difference is not of statistical significance.

The below chart shows the number of prisoners executed in the United States since 1930 – you will notice a sharp dive in the numbers in the middle – at first glance i thought this might be due to the suspension of the death penalty by the USA but on further research i discovered that capital punishment was only suspended for approximately 4 years (from 1972 until 1976). I would like to conduct further research into the reason behind the decline as it would be interesting to establish whether the types of crime that obtain the death penalty as a punishment were receding or if prosecutors were taking a more rehabilitative approach to justice (or any number of other possibilities).

Overall though, if you look at the total number of people on death row in the United States, there is a statistical relationship between the total number and the race of that same number, as is represented by the following graphs. What i mean by that is that between 1968 and 2007 the racial background of the those on death row changed in comparison to the total number of persons on death row. To explain that another way again, the number of Caucasians on death row rises incrementally with the number of people on death row, as does the number of Black people or Hispanics. If the number of Caucasian people on death row was decreasing as the total number of people on death row continued to increase this could be used as evidence for racial bias within the criminal justice system.