Baldus Study

The Baldus study, designed and conducted by David C. Baldus, George C. Woodworth, and Charles A. Pulaski, Jr., is a study of “equal justice” in death sentencing during a period of judicial conflict and controversy over capital punishment. This landmark study focused on levels of arbitrariness and racial discrimination in capital sentencing in Georgia during the period 1969–1979.

Three principal reasons led the authors of the study to concentrate on the state of Georgia. First, Georgia led the nation from 1930 to 1980 in the total number of offenders executed. Second, the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in both Furman v. Georgia (1972), which invalidated all capital sentencing statutes, and Gregg v. Georgia (1976), which upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty for murder, focused on Georgia's capital sentencing system. Third, the study was designed to challenge Georgia's post-Furman capital sentencing system on issues of arbitrariness and racial discrimination. As a consequence, the Baldus study was created to contest the effects of several key factors in the post-Furman era: the trial court sentencing reforms adopted by state legislatures, the expanded appellate oversight by state supreme courts, and the strict oversight of death penalty sentencing systems by state courts to ensure that they operate in a nondiscriminatory fashion.

The Baldus study consists of two empirical studies known as the Procedural Reform Study (PRS), which compares pre- and post-Furman results as a basis to estimate fairness in Georgia's capital sentencing in the post-Furman period, and the Charging and Sentencing Study (CSS), which was designed to study racial discrimination patterns for defendants indicted for murder or voluntary manslaughter between 1973 and 1979. Although the two studies differ in design, they both challenge the effects of the death sentence process in Georgia.

The impact of the Baldus study culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court case of McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) as an unsuccessful attempt to dispute the effectiveness of Georgia's death penalty statute. The petitioner in the McCleskey case argued that the Georgia death penalty statute under post-Furman law purposefully discriminated against defendants who were Black and against defendants whose victims were White, which subsequently violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. In addition, McCleskey argued that this discriminatory application of the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment as a result of the arbitrary, capricious, and irrational nature in which the death sentence had been invoked. The question would follow as to what magnitude the Court would give empirical data and statistical analysis as evidence in proving discrimination in a post-Furman death sentencing system.