9 ms·

Why a small handful of counties generates the bulk of US death sentences

88 points by yummypaint 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
the_lonely_road 5y ago
There is no death penalty in most counties and in the ones that have it there are many counties with very small populations and a small handful with mega cities like Dallas Texas in them.
- 9000 5y ago
  I assume you mean to imply that population alone explains the title of the post? My guess is the argument goes: (1) Crime scales with population. (2) Death sentences scale with crime. (3) Therefore, death sentences should scale with population. (4) The U.S.'s geographic distribution results in very dense clustering such that only a handful of counties have a lot of population. (5) Therefore, we would expect to see only a handful of counties account for the majority of death sentences. However, this line from the abstract seems to make (2) unlikely: > The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides. Thus, their argument is that something much deeper is going on than just population-level trends.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Sentences are imposed by judges, so if a judge in a given county has a hard-on for death sentences, you'll see more of them in that county.
    - khuey 5y ago
      The death penalty requires a jury to vote for it (usually unanimously) in most if not all US states.
      - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        All states nowadays, since Ring v. Arizona requires it.
    - gustavo-fring 5y ago
      Not just that but some judges are elected and research (I know, no cites) shows that elected judges get tougher in election years. Now you're making me wonder if they controlled for elected judges.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      It would be interesting to see a breakdown of whether male vs female judges have more or less death penalty sentences.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    As they say, any map of social effects in the US degrades into the population density map of the US, as they say. Normalizing by population density might help, but only in a limited way, because huge concentrations of people create different effects than pretty sparsely populated areas.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    I think the argument is more that there are only a handful of states that use the death penalty with any regularity, so most death sentences should be expected in the major population centers for those states. The best predictor of death sentences is going to be whether or not you are in Texas.
    - 9000 5y ago
      I mean, probably, but the article is explicitly only looking at states with the death penalty: > In the analyses below, we include only states allowing the death penalty in the year of analysis. Because we focus on the geographical variability in the use of the death penalty, we exclude the US military (which has sentenced 15 individuals to death since reestablishment in 1984, but carried out no executions) and the federal government (which has issued 79 death sentences since reinstatement in 1988, and carried out three executions). And with this in mind, they still found that death sentences didn't correlate well with the homicide rate: > The table also lists the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population. If there was a direct link among these variables, we would expect some consistency here. But we see very little. In fact, the correlations are surprisingly low; in fact, the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population correlate at -0.12. The counties with the highest raw numbers of death sentences listed in the table include not a single county that ranks in the top 100 with regards to death sentences per 100 homicides. First, even the death penalty rate isn't approximately equal across the sample, so it's not just population. And second, they are saying that the death penalty rate doesn't even correlate well with the crime rate. And yet there are still a few outlier counties that have an abnormally high death penalty rate! That is what is unintuitive. I mean, sure, it makes some sense that some counties are more likely to issue the death penalty than others, even where it's legal, but it's a huge skew, and it's very different from saying "Texas has a lot of people."
  - jcims 5y ago
    I would probably qualify (3) with 'in counties that choose to implement it' which would make your model (which I agree with) fit the observations in the abstract. I wouldn't think most counties decide to implement the death penalty based on number or types of crime (aside from 100 year outliers) as 'life in prison without possibility of parole' is also satisfactory in most cases. I would wager that the first execution in most counties occur after a specific election rather than a specific crime.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Torkel 5y ago
”A death sentencing system based on racial dynamics and then amplified by self-referential dynamics is inconsistent with equal protection of the law, but this describes the United States system well.”
- andyxor 5y ago
  many words, but just from the title one could have guessed the conclusion "them must be rayciss" the only thing worse than pseudo-science is pseudo-science motivated by political agenda of the day.
navait 5y ago
tl;dr "This model shows that the cumulative number of death sentences previously imposed in the same county is a strong predictor of the number imposed in a given year. Results raise troubling substantive implications: The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides."
steve76 5y ago
How many executions in 2020? 17 How many people murdered due to the Reign of Terror 2020? 4,000+ Wow, your trendy pet activism of the bailed out rich killed more people than bin Laden. How about a study on that? You also mention Jim Crow. May we look at the slavery you commit today, far worse than any other time in human history. Where do you think all your drugs, and sex workers, and cheap clothes and cheap electronics and child soldiers come from?
graderjs 5y ago
From a section on theory of self-reinforcement Once an office assembles a staff that has handled a capital trial, it draws upon this capacity to pursue the death penalty in subsequent cases, which further augments the office’s institutional capacity to pursue the death penalty. This self-reinforcing dynamic between capacity and caseload makes it more likely for offices that obtain death sentences to seek the death penalty going forward. Conversely, offices that cease to obtain death penalties (or never obtained death penalties in the first place) may be less likely to reverse course as institutional capacity for death penalty sentencing erodes (or is never developed). … This path dependency may reflect practices of prosecutors who make the charging decisions whether to seek the death penalty, but it may also capture defense lawyering, judges, jurors, and other features of a county that make it more likely to continue to death sentence over time Wow, Kafka couldn't have said it better himself. Morbid bureaucratic mechanism of horror
- fnord77 5y ago
  The Penal Colony. That story is etched into my brain. Ugh
- gustavo-fring 5y ago
  The Repeat Player vs. The One-Shot Player https://hschottlaender.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/the-repeat-player-vs-the-one-shot-player/ https://hschottlaender.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/the-repeat-p... (I don't know how good this source is.) Ideally this dynamic would also mean that defense lawyers and norms would get better over time instead of atrophying.
- throwaway8581 5y ago
  What is so horrible or kafkaesque about that? Prosecuting death penalty cases is hard and politically contentious. It also not a necessity, as you can secure life imprisonment sentences with much less effort. It makes sense that only those places committed to the practice will continue it.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    More people being put to death because the autonomous bureaucracy has gotten better at putting people to death is pretty kafkaesque. It reminds me of the short story with “the machine” that cuts progressively deeper over time.
throwaway8581 5y ago
>This model shows that the cumulative number of death sentences previously imposed in the same county is a strong predictor of the number imposed in a given year. Sorry to be dismissive, but this is obvious. People who ate a lot of steak last year are likely to eat a lot of steak this year. People who did X a lot last year are more likely to do X a lot this year than people who did X less last year. Some district attorneys' offices are more interested in pursuing the death penalty than others. How often to pursue the death penalty is a political question. Liberal district attorneys are much less interested in it than conservative district attorneys. And because the last 40 years of case law have made it very difficult to correctly prosecute a death penalty case without getting overturned for some reason on appeal, it is a significant financial investment for a prosecutor's office to pursue the death penalty. And the expense is not just the prosecution but the decades of appeals and other legal actions that will follow. So it makes sense that death penalty prosecutions are centered in places committed to pursuing the death penalty.
- geofft 5y ago
  On the other hand, people who bought a house last year are far less likely than the general population to buy a house this year. The non-obvious part is that the death penalty follows the first model and not the second. You could reason from first principles that the death penalty's intended effect is to prevent crime by executing a criminal, which is a long-term action like buying a house and not a short-term one like buying a steak. Or you could reason that its intended effect is to deter crime by presenting a deeply undesirable outcome for criminals. The surprise is that it's neither, and the counties so often have more people to execute.
  - naniwaduni 5y ago
    > On the other hand, people who bought a house last year are far less likely than the general population to buy a house this year. Is this even true? This is a non-obvious claim where the exact opposite phenomenon is allegedly true of other seemingly one-time purchases (e.g. cars, household appliances).
    - 5y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
I think this study is orthogonal to whether or not the death penalty is a good thing. There are a lot of things that are self-reinforcing. Take for examples, unions. Whether or not you think unions are a good thing or bad thing, likely you will be more successful unionizing a company that is located where there already are a lot of unions. For example, one of the big disadvantages of the Alabama Amazon union organizers was that they were in a part of the country where there was a strong anti-union sentiment in general. To get to something more related to law enforcement, likely certain areas of the country will have more success in convicting police officers of murders. For example, the Chauvin trial, instead of being held in Hennepin County, was held in a small rural county in norther Minnesota would most probably been harder to convince the jury to convict on all three counts and probably would have had a higher chance of a hung jury(which is why the defense asked to moved the venue). Yes different parts of the country, and even the state will have likely different outcomes. This will be true for a lot of things. This observation is orthogonal to whether what you want is right or wrong. After all, no one would argue that Chauvin’s conviction should be thrown out since a different jury in a different part of the country might have reached a different conclusion?
- throwaway8581 5y ago
  I fully expect the defense to argue on appeal that venue was improper. People have had criminal convictions overturned for improper venue before. Minneapolis suffered an extreme level of political turmoil due to the George Floyd death, and local public officials there spent the last year talking about basically nothing else.
chmod600 5y ago
"The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides." That's not exactly a surprising result. A lot of people (probably including me) just won't use the death penalty unless there's a serial killer who videotaped his crimes and swore to break out of jail. The ones who will use the death penalty in more cases are not uniformly distributed.
chmod600 5y ago
"A death sentencing system based on racial dynamics and then amplified by self-referential dynamics is inconsistent with equal protection of the law, but this describes the United States system well." This reads strangely to me. It's like saying: "Our research found that 2+2=4. In combination with racial dynamics, this is inconsistent with equal protection of the law." I get that they are saying it amplifies, but they injected it in a weird way that makes their research sound more important to a broader conclusion than it is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cycomanic 5y ago
  They could have left out the racial dynamics parts and the sentence would have been just as true. So not like your objection. A justice system where the chances of being given the death penalty is highly dependent on what county you are prosecuted in is inconsistent with equal protection of the law.
  - throwaway8581 5y ago
    It's fine. You elect your local DA, mayor, and police chief. You also vote for your governor, state legislators, state judges (in most states), and state attorney general (in some). They get to make important decisions, like how strongly to enforce the law and what punishments to seek. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth voting for them. In San Francisco, most crime is basically tolerated and punishment for most offenders is not sought. In more conservative parts of the country, that is not the case. If you don't want to be executed, don't commit murder in places where the death penalty is legal and exercised.
  - chmod600 5y ago
    Local variance in how strictly the law is applied is expected. I don't really see that as violating equal protection.
beervirus 5y ago
Only ~21 states currently employ the death penalty. Within each state, a very small number of counties include high-crime areas. The paper’s conclusions follow from this.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

88 points by yummypaint 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

There is no death penalty in most counties and in the ones that have it there are many counties with very small populations and a small handful with mega cities like Dallas Texas in them.

9000 5y ago
I assume you mean to imply that population alone explains the title of the post? My guess is the argument goes: (1) Crime scales with population. (2) Death sentences scale with crime. (3) Therefore, death sentences should scale with population. (4) The U.S.'s geographic distribution results in very dense clustering such that only a handful of counties have a lot of population. (5) Therefore, we would expect to see only a handful of counties account for the majority of death sentences. However, this line from the abstract seems to make (2) unlikely: > The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides. Thus, their argument is that something much deeper is going on than just population-level trends.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Sentences are imposed by judges, so if a judge in a given county has a hard-on for death sentences, you'll see more of them in that county.
  - khuey 5y ago
    The death penalty requires a jury to vote for it (usually unanimously) in most if not all US states.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      All states nowadays, since Ring v. Arizona requires it.
  - gustavo-fring 5y ago
    Not just that but some judges are elected and research (I know, no cites) shows that elected judges get tougher in election years. Now you're making me wonder if they controlled for elected judges.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    It would be interesting to see a breakdown of whether male vs female judges have more or less death penalty sentences.
- nine_k 5y ago
  As they say, any map of social effects in the US degrades into the population density map of the US, as they say. Normalizing by population density might help, but only in a limited way, because huge concentrations of people create different effects than pretty sparsely populated areas.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  I think the argument is more that there are only a handful of states that use the death penalty with any regularity, so most death sentences should be expected in the major population centers for those states. The best predictor of death sentences is going to be whether or not you are in Texas.
  - 9000 5y ago
    I mean, probably, but the article is explicitly only looking at states with the death penalty: > In the analyses below, we include only states allowing the death penalty in the year of analysis. Because we focus on the geographical variability in the use of the death penalty, we exclude the US military (which has sentenced 15 individuals to death since reestablishment in 1984, but carried out no executions) and the federal government (which has issued 79 death sentences since reinstatement in 1988, and carried out three executions). And with this in mind, they still found that death sentences didn't correlate well with the homicide rate: > The table also lists the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population. If there was a direct link among these variables, we would expect some consistency here. But we see very little. In fact, the correlations are surprisingly low; in fact, the rate of death sentences per 100 homicides and the rate of homicides per 100,000 population correlate at -0.12. The counties with the highest raw numbers of death sentences listed in the table include not a single county that ranks in the top 100 with regards to death sentences per 100 homicides. First, even the death penalty rate isn't approximately equal across the sample, so it's not just population. And second, they are saying that the death penalty rate doesn't even correlate well with the crime rate. And yet there are still a few outlier counties that have an abnormally high death penalty rate! That is what is unintuitive. I mean, sure, it makes some sense that some counties are more likely to issue the death penalty than others, even where it's legal, but it's a huge skew, and it's very different from saying "Texas has a lot of people."
- jcims 5y ago
  I would probably qualify (3) with 'in counties that choose to implement it' which would make your model (which I agree with) fit the observations in the abstract. I wouldn't think most counties decide to implement the death penalty based on number or types of crime (aside from 100 year outliers) as 'life in prison without possibility of parole' is also satisfactory in most cases. I would wager that the first execution in most counties occur after a specific election rather than a specific crime.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Torkel 5y ago

”A death sentencing system based on racial dynamics and then amplified by self-referential dynamics is inconsistent with equal protection of the law, but this describes the United States system well.”

andyxor 5y ago
many words, but just from the title one could have guessed the conclusion "them must be rayciss" the only thing worse than pseudo-science is pseudo-science motivated by political agenda of the day.

navait 5y ago

tl;dr "This model shows that the cumulative number of death sentences previously imposed in the same county is a strong predictor of the number imposed in a given year. Results raise troubling substantive implications: The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides."

steve76 5y ago

How many executions in 2020? 17 How many people murdered due to the Reign of Terror 2020? 4,000+ Wow, your trendy pet activism of the bailed out rich killed more people than bin Laden. How about a study on that? You also mention Jim Crow. May we look at the slavery you commit today, far worse than any other time in human history. Where do you think all your drugs, and sex workers, and cheap clothes and cheap electronics and child soldiers come from?

graderjs 5y ago

From a section on theory of self-reinforcement Once an office assembles a staff that has handled a capital trial, it draws upon this capacity to pursue the death penalty in subsequent cases, which further augments the office’s institutional capacity to pursue the death penalty. This self-reinforcing dynamic between capacity and caseload makes it more likely for offices that obtain death sentences to seek the death penalty going forward. Conversely, offices that cease to obtain death penalties (or never obtained death penalties in the first place) may be less likely to reverse course as institutional capacity for death penalty sentencing erodes (or is never developed). … This path dependency may reflect practices of prosecutors who make the charging decisions whether to seek the death penalty, but it may also capture defense lawyering, judges, jurors, and other features of a county that make it more likely to continue to death sentence over time Wow, Kafka couldn't have said it better himself. Morbid bureaucratic mechanism of horror

fnord77 5y ago
The Penal Colony. That story is etched into my brain. Ugh
gustavo-fring 5y ago
The Repeat Player vs. The One-Shot Player https://hschottlaender.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/the-repeat-player-vs-the-one-shot-player/ https://hschottlaender.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/the-repeat-p... (I don't know how good this source is.) Ideally this dynamic would also mean that defense lawyers and norms would get better over time instead of atrophying.
throwaway8581 5y ago
What is so horrible or kafkaesque about that? Prosecuting death penalty cases is hard and politically contentious. It also not a necessity, as you can secure life imprisonment sentences with much less effort. It makes sense that only those places committed to the practice will continue it.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  More people being put to death because the autonomous bureaucracy has gotten better at putting people to death is pretty kafkaesque. It reminds me of the short story with “the machine” that cuts progressively deeper over time.

throwaway8581 5y ago

>This model shows that the cumulative number of death sentences previously imposed in the same county is a strong predictor of the number imposed in a given year. Sorry to be dismissive, but this is obvious. People who ate a lot of steak last year are likely to eat a lot of steak this year. People who did X a lot last year are more likely to do X a lot this year than people who did X less last year. Some district attorneys' offices are more interested in pursuing the death penalty than others. How often to pursue the death penalty is a political question. Liberal district attorneys are much less interested in it than conservative district attorneys. And because the last 40 years of case law have made it very difficult to correctly prosecute a death penalty case without getting overturned for some reason on appeal, it is a significant financial investment for a prosecutor's office to pursue the death penalty. And the expense is not just the prosecution but the decades of appeals and other legal actions that will follow. So it makes sense that death penalty prosecutions are centered in places committed to pursuing the death penalty.

geofft 5y ago
On the other hand, people who bought a house last year are far less likely than the general population to buy a house this year. The non-obvious part is that the death penalty follows the first model and not the second. You could reason from first principles that the death penalty's intended effect is to prevent crime by executing a criminal, which is a long-term action like buying a house and not a short-term one like buying a steak. Or you could reason that its intended effect is to deter crime by presenting a deeply undesirable outcome for criminals. The surprise is that it's neither, and the counties so often have more people to execute.
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  > On the other hand, people who bought a house last year are far less likely than the general population to buy a house this year. Is this even true? This is a non-obvious claim where the exact opposite phenomenon is allegedly true of other seemingly one-time purchases (e.g. cars, household appliances).
  - 5y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

I think this study is orthogonal to whether or not the death penalty is a good thing. There are a lot of things that are self-reinforcing. Take for examples, unions. Whether or not you think unions are a good thing or bad thing, likely you will be more successful unionizing a company that is located where there already are a lot of unions. For example, one of the big disadvantages of the Alabama Amazon union organizers was that they were in a part of the country where there was a strong anti-union sentiment in general. To get to something more related to law enforcement, likely certain areas of the country will have more success in convicting police officers of murders. For example, the Chauvin trial, instead of being held in Hennepin County, was held in a small rural county in norther Minnesota would most probably been harder to convince the jury to convict on all three counts and probably would have had a higher chance of a hung jury(which is why the defense asked to moved the venue). Yes different parts of the country, and even the state will have likely different outcomes. This will be true for a lot of things. This observation is orthogonal to whether what you want is right or wrong. After all, no one would argue that Chauvin’s conviction should be thrown out since a different jury in a different part of the country might have reached a different conclusion?

throwaway8581 5y ago
I fully expect the defense to argue on appeal that venue was improper. People have had criminal convictions overturned for improper venue before. Minneapolis suffered an extreme level of political turmoil due to the George Floyd death, and local public officials there spent the last year talking about basically nothing else.

chmod600 5y ago

"The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county’s previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides." That's not exactly a surprising result. A lot of people (probably including me) just won't use the death penalty unless there's a serial killer who videotaped his crimes and swore to break out of jail. The ones who will use the death penalty in more cases are not uniformly distributed.

chmod600 5y ago

"A death sentencing system based on racial dynamics and then amplified by self-referential dynamics is inconsistent with equal protection of the law, but this describes the United States system well." This reads strangely to me. It's like saying: "Our research found that 2+2=4. In combination with racial dynamics, this is inconsistent with equal protection of the law." I get that they are saying it amplifies, but they injected it in a weird way that makes their research sound more important to a broader conclusion than it is.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cycomanic 5y ago
They could have left out the racial dynamics parts and the sentence would have been just as true. So not like your objection. A justice system where the chances of being given the death penalty is highly dependent on what county you are prosecuted in is inconsistent with equal protection of the law.
- throwaway8581 5y ago
  It's fine. You elect your local DA, mayor, and police chief. You also vote for your governor, state legislators, state judges (in most states), and state attorney general (in some). They get to make important decisions, like how strongly to enforce the law and what punishments to seek. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth voting for them. In San Francisco, most crime is basically tolerated and punishment for most offenders is not sought. In more conservative parts of the country, that is not the case. If you don't want to be executed, don't commit murder in places where the death penalty is legal and exercised.
- chmod600 5y ago
  Local variance in how strictly the law is applied is expected. I don't really see that as violating equal protection.

beervirus 5y ago

Only ~21 states currently employ the death penalty. Within each state, a very small number of counties include high-crime areas. The paper’s conclusions follow from this.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]