Trial structure biases juries toward the death penalty via ‘structural aggravation’

Evidence

The factors included in the conditional list can influence the penalty that the jury is likely to impose. For example, the scope of the mitigating factors tend to be more limited and, because the jurors already have found the defendant guilty, they have more difficulty weighing mitigating circumstances, which would decrease the gravity of the crime. The sequencing of the two decisional phases also favors a death verdict. Given that jurors have already judged the defendant guilty in the guilt phase of the trial, they tend to focus on aggravating factors in the penalty phase as further justification for their decision to impose the death penalty. Haney (2005) coined the phrase “structural aggravation” to identify this built-in focus on aggravating factors, which arises out of the jurors’ desire to punish the person whom they have already found guilty. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2004

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘structural aggravation’ — Haney’s term for built-in pro-death bias from phase sequencing.
• SEED: The two-phase guilt-then-penalty structure is a clean example of how procedural design shapes moral outcomes — angle for an article on institutional design and moral disengagement.
• XREF: Parallels the Champagne Fairs’ well-structured phases channeling trade behavior — procedural architecture shapes outcomes in both cases.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2004