Race pairing predicts death sentences even after controlling for legal factors

Evidence

The researchers controlled for an array of legally relevant variables, including aggravating circumstances, mitigating circumstances, brutality of the homicide, defendant’s and victim’s socioeconomic status, and varying levels of culpability. Consistent with the Second Law-of-Law, use of logistic regression analyses revealed that, at average levels of culpability, subordinates (i.e., Blacks) were most likely to be condemned to death for the capital murder of a dominant and were least likely to be condemned to death for the capital murder of another subordinate. Furthermore, the race of victim/ race of defendant combination least likely to result in a death sentence was in the capital murder of a subordinate at the hands of a dominant (see Baldus, Woodworth, Zuckerman, & Weiner, 1998; see also Grosso, O’Brien, Taylor, & Woodworth, 2014). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 72

Categorization

• XREF: The controlled Philadelphia death-penalty study is strong evidence for the measured-bias gap the reader is documenting in legal contexts. — connects to: Administering presumed guilt by area doubles down racialized vulnerability to death. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 508; Racial framing decides which killers get mythologized versus executed by police — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1751
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 72