Jurors frame death verdicts as provisional statements, diffusing responsibility to appellate judges

Evidence

In a study of capital-case jurors (Haney et al., 1994), one participant describes how some jurors cited the low execution rate in their deliberations to persuade other, more reluctant jurors to vote for the death penalty: “We talked about the fact that if you have a hard time voting for the death penalty, are you really not just voting for life imprisonment? Because there hasn’t been an execution in over 20 years in California. And so, you know, is it really more a statement than it is an actuality.” However, jurors in southern deathpenalty states also deny that their verdicts are consequential. Jurors do not see themselves as deciding whether defendants live or die. They view their decisions as merely provisional, because at some point in the appeals process, an appellate judge ultimately will decide the question. Even if a death sentence is upheld, jurors point to evidence that convicted inmates are rarely executed. As one juror said, “Ninety-nine percent of the time they don’t put you to death. You sit on death row and get old” (Sarat, 1995). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2009

Categorization

• XREF: This juror’s diffusing of responsibility onto appellate judges parallels the author of the harm offloading consequence onto some downstream institutional actor — same mechanism Bandura would apply to policy support where voters claim ‘the system will decide.’
• DEEPTHINKING: The juror’s verbal contortion — calling a death verdict ‘more a statement than an actuality’ — is a rich case of language’s self-deceptive power, where the agent redefines a lethal choice as symbolic while knowing others in the same deliberation admit the execution gap came from institutional failure, not moral reprieve.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2009