Capital trial structure deliberately enables jurors’ moral self-exoneration

Evidence

If the jurors call for the death penalty, they will have to live with the knowledge that they will be parties to the intentional killing of a human being. They also have to distance themselves from the consequences of a death sentence. To allow jurors to make this decision, capital trials are structured so that the jurors do not see themselves as responsible for sentencing a human being to death. They achieve self-exoneration through social justification, diffusion of responsibility, and minimization of consequences. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1984

Categorization

• XREF: Institutional design deliberately engineering moral disengagement parallels the vault’s claims about how policy structures let ordinary citizens rationalize harmful outcomes.
• DEFINE: Concrete demonstration that institutional procedure actively recruits social justification, diffusion of responsibility, and minimization of consequences — the mechanism’s real-world wiring.
• SEED: Angle: the death penalty as a designed moral loophole — what other institutions are deliberately architected so participants do not feel responsible for the killing or harm their choices produce?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1984