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29 November 2006

Remembering the Baldus Study, Part I

Jim Greiner

One of my current research interests is the application of a potential outcomes framework of causation to perceptions of what lawyers call “immutable characteristics" like race, gender, or national origin. In that vein, I’d like to pay tribute to one of the early greats in the area of quantitative analysis of race in the legal setting: the so-called “Baldus Study” of the role of race in imposition of the death penalty in Georgia. The Study authors, David Baldus, George C. Woodworth, and Charles A. Pulaski, Jr,, gathered data on over 1000 Georgia homicides from 1973-1979. Although the Study attempted to tackle a variety of questions, the most publicized was whether recent reforms to Georgia’s sentencing process (enacted in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia) had succeeded in removing the relevance of race in the state’s capital sentencing system. The Study’s primary conclusion on this point was that the race of the victim, but not the race of the defendant, played a significant role in deciding whether death was imposed.

The Study was highly publicized, and it led to its own Supreme Court case. In McCleskey v. Kemp, four justices thought that the conclusions of the Baldus Study were sufficient to render Georgia’s capital sentencing system unconstitutional. Five justices disagreed; they thought that the capital defendant in the case had to show that race had played a role in HIS trial, not that race generally played a role in the set capital trials.

More on the Baldus Study in my next post.

Posted by James Greiner at November 29, 2006 1:53 PM

Comments

Posted by: tom volscho at November 30, 2006 5:23 AM