Unintelligible sentencing instructions let jurors displace responsibility for death sentences

Evidence

Jurors distance themselves in a variety of ways from the decision to condemn a person to death. They displace responsibility by construing their decision as compelled by the sentencing instructions. Jurors are provided with decision rules and a set of mitigating and aggravating factors that they must take into account in deciding the severity of the penalty. In tests of comprehensibility, jurors have only a poor understanding of sentencing instructions (Eisenberg & Wells, 1993; Haney, 2005). Jurors are unclear about what constitutes mitigating and aggravating conditions. They are also unaware of how to weigh these factors in the rules for deciding between a sentence of death or lifetime imprisonment. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1995

Categorization

• XREF: Directly shows the displacement-of-responsibility mechanism in a high-stakes institutional setting, complementary to Cooper/authoritarianism claims about ordinary people deferring to rules. — connects to: Capital punishment was struck down because juries imposed it arbitrarily and freakishly. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2002; Formal written jury instructions became opaque to the juries they supposedly guided. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2316
• ADDENDUM: Could append the jury finding to the sacrifice article’s discussion of institutionalized killing, showing how ordinary citizens delegate lethal judgment to procedural rules.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1995