Processing and Outcome of Death Penalty Appeals After Furman v. Georgia, 1973-1995: [United States] (ICPSR 3468)

Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)

Date of Collection View help for Date of Collection

Data Collection Notes View help for Data Collection Notes

Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose

In its decision in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, the United States Supreme Court invalidated all then-existing death penalty laws, determining that the death penalty was applied in an "arbitrary and capricious" and unreliable manner that violated Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. In 1976 the high court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that, on its face, Georgia's new "guided discretion" capital-sentencing procedures appeared to have reduced the problem of arbitrary, capricious, and unreliable death verdicts that had led the Court to invalidate prior capital statutes in Furman v. Georgia. On the same day that it decided Gregg, the Supreme Court also decided four other capital cases. In two of those cases, Woodson v. North Carolina and Roberts v. Louisiana, the Court ruled that North Carolina's and Louisiana's mandatory method of imposing a death sentence for the crime of first-degree or capital murder was unconstitutional. The Court determined that the Eighth Amendment proscription of cruel and unusual punishment requires heightened reliability of outcomes in death cases, and that this in turn requires that each defendant be evaluated individually to determine whether the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for the particular crime. In these and other decisions, the Court concluded that modern death-sentencing statutes adopted on the model of the Georgia statute that the Court upheld on its face in Gregg v. Georgia potentially had the capacity to provide the necessary degree of reliability in the imposition of death verdicts. The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability of death verdicts imposed under presumptively valid post-Furman capital statutes by measuring the frequency with which the state and federal courts that inspect those verdicts found flaws in them that were sufficiently serious and prejudicial to require reversal of the death verdict and retrial/resentencing. A second purpose was to identify conditions at the state, county, and case level that are associated with a higher probability of reversible error in capital cases and to identify possible reforms to decrease that probability.

Study Design View help for Study Design

The researchers created a pooled, cross-sectional database of capital verdicts from 1973-1995 including review outcome by stage of review, state, county, and year. Data provided for this collection include information about the timing and outcome of death verdict review proceedings by state and year at the state direct appeal, state post-conviction, federal habeas corpus, and all three stages of review, as well as a set of relevant characteristics of death penalty states (Part 1). Information about the outcomes and other characteristics of capital review proceedings were obtained from official published and unpublished judicial decisions, as described below. Other data were compiled from published and archived material on the passage of death penalty statutes following the Furman decision, official and archived sources providing data on population and racial composition, homicide trends, state crime trends, state prison population, court caseloads, court expenditures, capital defense expenditures, state welfare caseloads and expenditures, states' political structure, the race of defendants sentenced to die, the race of the victims of the offenses for which defendants were sentenced to die, and published sources providing information on judges and judicial philosophy. An index of political pressure on state court judges, based on characteristics of each state's method of selecting judges for office, was created for this project, drawing on state constitutional and statutory provisions, with additional information supplied by the National Center for State Courts. Also provided in this collection are state and county characteristics and the outcomes of death verdict review proceedings by county, as well as state and year, at state direct appeal, state post-conviction, federal habeas corpus, and all three stages of review (Part 2). Data for Part 2 were compiled from similar sources but do not include court expenditure and welfare data. Three databases original to this study were assembled by the authors, all of which include information on the outcomes of capital appeals or state and federal post-conviction review proceedings and other information about those appeals and proceedings and the individuals, offenses, procedures, and legal claims involved in them. This information came from official published and unpublished judicial decisions describing and reporting the outcome of those appeals and state and federal post-conviction review procedures. Identifying appellate and post-conviction decisions so that this information could be extracted from them presented a challenge, because no official, publicly available list existed of the decisions in, or outcomes of, capital appeals for any state in the country. The researchers accordingly designed a systematic way to identify capital appellate and state and federal post-conviction decisions by using a variety of search criteria in databases of judicial decisions. One search criterion was the names of death row inmates, which were identified using the following sources: the list of individuals on death row across the country maintained and published by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's (NAACP LDF), "Death Row USA", lists of death row inmates kept by state courts, state attorneys, state prisons, state-level defender organizations, and state-level non-governmental organizations, and newspaper accounts naming capital prisoners. Legal databases, West's national reporter system, and the Westlaw and Lexis electronic search engines then were searched using (1) the names derived from the above-listed sources, (2) keyword searches designed to identify capital appeals and state and federal post-conviction decisions in capital cases, and (3) information in judicial decisions identified through these same means, including information about other cases involving the same prisoner and about the cases of co-participants in the prisoner's offense. Information also was obtained from official but unpublished decisions available in archives of court and case records. The information in the three databases original to this study is from the published and unpublished judicial decisions that were identified through the means just described. The first of the three databases assembled as part of this project was the Direct Appeal Database (DADB) (Part 3). This database contains information on decisions on state direct appeals of capital verdicts imposed in all years during the 1973-1995 study period in which the relevant state had a valid post-Furman capital statute. The appeals in this database include all those that were identified as having been finally decided during the 1973 to 1995 period. The second original database, State Post-Conviction Database (SPCDB) (Part 4), contains a list of capital verdicts that were imposed during the years between 1973 and 2000 when the relevant state had a valid post-Furman capital statute and that were finally reversed on state post-conviction review between 1973 and April 2000. The third original database, Habeas Corpus Database (HCDB) (Part 5), contains information on all decisions of initial (non-successive) capital federal habeas corpus cases between 1973 and 1995 that finally reviewed capital verdicts imposed during years in the 1973 to 1995 period when the relevant state had a valid post-Furman capital statute.

Sample View help for Sample

Parts 1-2: Inapplicable. Parts 3-5: Allowable cases based on criteria specific to that court process.

Universe View help for Universe

All capital appeals in the United States decided between 1973 and 1995.

Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation

Data Source View help for Data Source

Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)

Description of Variables View help for Description of Variables

Part 1 variables include state and state population, population density, death sentence year, year the state enacted a valid post-Furman capital statute, total homicides, number of African-Americans in the state population, number of white and African-American homicide victims, number of prison inmates, number of FBI Index Crimes, number of civil, criminal, and felony court cases awaiting decision, number of death verdicts, number of Black defendants sentenced to death, rate of white victims of homicides for which defendants were sentenced to death per 100 white homicide victims, percentage of death row inmates sentenced to death for offenses against at least one white victim, number of death verdicts reviewed, awaiting review, and granted relief at all three states of review, number of welfare recipients and welfare expenditures, direct expenditures on the court system, party-adjusted judicial ideology index, political pressure index, and several other created variables. Part 2 provides this same state-level information and also provides similar variables at the county level. Court expenditure and welfare data are not provided in Part 2, however. Part 3 provides data on each capital direct appeal decision, including state, FIPS state and county code for trial court county, year of death verdict, year of decision, whether the verdict was affirmed or reversed, and year of first fully valid post-Furman statute. The date and citation for rehearing in the state system and on certiorari to the United States Supreme Court are provided in some cases. For reversals in Part 4 information was collected about state of death verdict, FIPS state and county code for trial court county, year of death verdict, date of relief, basis for reversal, stage of trial and aspect of verdict (guilty of aggravated capital murder, death sentence) affected by reversal, outcome on retrial, and citation. Part 5 variables include state, FIPS state and county codes for trial court county, year of death verdict, defendant's history of alcohol or drug abuse, whether the defendant was intoxicated at the time of the crime, whether the defense attorney was from in-state, whether the defendant was connected to the community where the crime occurred, whether the victim had a high standing in the community, sex of the victim, whether the defendant had a prior record, whether a state evidentiary hearing was held, number of claims for final federal decision, whether a majority of the judges voting to reverse were appointed by Republican presidents, aggravating and mitigating circumstances, whether habeas corpus relief was granted, what claims for habeas corpus relief were presented, and the outcome on each claim that was presented. Part 5 also includes citations to the direct appeal decision, the state post-conviction decision (last state decision on merits), the judicial decision at the pre-penultimate federal stage, the decision at the penultimate federal stage, and the final federal decision.

Response Rates View help for Response Rates

Not applicable.

Presence of Common Scales View help for Presence of Common Scales

None.

Original Release Date View help for Original Release Date

2002-08-29

Version History View help for Version History