The study, "Life and Death Decisions: Prosecutorial Discretion and Capital Punishment in Missouri," is available at SSRN.
KTVI-TV of St. Louis reports, "Local Death Penalty Study Say Mo Should Suspend Executions."
A new study concludes Missouri should suspend all executions.
FOX 2’s Charles Jaco says the controversial study is drawing fire from death penalty supporters.
The study shows a person facing a capital charge in outstate Missouri is much more likely to be executed than a similar defendant in urban areas. It also finds that a white capital defendant is twice as likely to actually be executed as an African American defendant.
The study finds life or death in Missouri can largely be an issue of where the trial's held.
After looking at hundreds of murder cases in Missouri the law professors found white defendants in rural Missouri have around twice the chance of actually being executed as African American defendants in urban counties.
In fact the disparity among various counties in Missouri is so great that the study calls for the state legislature to halt executions until uniform statewide policies can be established.
St. Louis University School of Law's David Sloss, one of the study's authors, writes, "Death penalty: In Missouri, where you live may matter," in the St. Louis Beacon.
In a properly functioning democratic system, the legislature should make the key policy decisions, and executive officials should implement those decisions. There is no more important policy decision than determining what types of crimes merit capital punishment. In Missouri, the legislature has effectively delegated that decision to county prosecutors.
Two co-authors and I recently completed a detailed empirical study of capital punishment in Missouri. The data show that only 2.5 percent of defendants prosecuted for intentional homicide are sentenced to death. In about 2.5 percent of cases, juries reject the death penalty. This means that 95 percent of intentional homicide cases are never presented to juries as capital cases. However, more than 76 percent of intentional homicide cases are eligible for the death penalty under the statute.
Discretionary choices by individual prosecutors account for the difference between the 76 percent of cases that are death-eligible and the 5 percent that are presented to juries as capital cases. In sum, in 71 percent of intentional homicide cases in Missouri, prosecutors decide not to pursue a capital trial even though the case is death-eligible under the rules promulgated by the legislature.
If prosecutors in different counties exercised their discretion in similar ways, the system would not produce arbitrary results. In fact, though, substantial variations exist across counties.
Prosecutors in St. Louis County pursued capital trials in more than 7 percent of their intentional homicide cases. In contrast, prosecutors in Jackson County (Kansas City) pursued capital trials in fewer than one-half of 1 percent of their cases. These disparities raise the disturbing possibility that decisions about who lives and who dies may be guided more by the philosophical predilections of individual prosecutors than the culpability of individual defendants.
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