Death Qualification of Juries

The Nature and Effect of Death Qualification

In modern death penalty jurisprudence, all capital trials are bifurcated. If a capital defendant is convicted of a crime for which the death penalty is a possible punishment (first-degree murder plus some special circumstance or feature that is found to be present in the case), a second sentencing or penalty phase of the trial is held. In this phase, the capital jury decides whether to sentence the defendant to death or some lesser punishment (typically life in prison without possibility of parole). To accommodate the state's interest in having only those jurors serve who can consider imposing the death penalty in the second part of the capital trial, should one occur, the law permits the screening of all potential jurors on the basis of their death penalty views. However, this selection or screening process transpires at the very outset of the trial, before any evidence has been presented and, perforce, before the actual jury has decided whether the defendant is guilty or not. Because it occurs so early in the trial, death qualification may have a significant impact on all of the jury's subsequent decision making.

In fact, social science research has established the fact that death-qualified juries are significantly different from non-death-qualified juries in a number of important ways. For one, death qualification produces juries that are less representative than nondeath-qualified juries. That is, because women and minorities (especially African Americans) are more likely to oppose the death penalty, they are more likely to be excluded from death-qualified juries. Also, because attitudes toward the death penalty tend to be correlated with other attitudes about the criminal justice system, researchers have found that death qualification produces juries that hold a more homogeneous perspective than other juries, where attitudinal diversity would be more likely to occur. Among other things, death-qualified juries are generally more favorable to the perspectives of prosecutors and law enforcement, more susceptible to things such as potentially prejudicial pretrial publicity and aggravating evidence that may be introduced at trial, and simultaneously more oriented toward “crime control” goals and less committed to “due process” values.

Perhaps not surprisingly—given the way death qualification skews the composition of the group deemed eligible to serve, death-qualified juries also tend to be “conviction prone.” That is, based on the same set of case facts and circumstances, research shows that they are more likely to find a defendant guilty than are nondeath-qualified juries. Of course, because they are selected precisely on the basis of their willingness to impose the death penalty, they also are “death prone”—that is, they are more likely to render death verdicts than a non-death-qualified jury would be.

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