Roper v. Simmons,543 U.S. 551 (2005).
Zimring, F. E. (2003). The contradictions of American capital
punishment. New York: Oxford University Press.Web Sites
Death Penalty Information Center:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.orgDEATHQUALIFICATION OFJURIES
Death qualification is a unique form of jury selection
that is used only in capital cases. Potential jurors are
screened beforehand on the basis of their attitudes
toward death penalty, and persons holding “disquali-
fying” attitudes or beliefs about capital punishment
are dismissed from further participation. In the late
1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court established the stan-
dard by which prospective jurors could be constitu-
tionally excluded from service on a capital jury as one
of “unequivocal opposition” (i.e., if the prospective
juror said that he or she could never impose the death
penalty no matter what the facts or circumstances of
the case). Since then, the process of death qualifica-
tion has been the subject of extensive legal commen-
tary and social science research, as well as the focus
of a number of constitutional challenges and revisions
in the legal standard of exclusion itself.The Nature and Effect
of Death Qualification
In modern death penalty jurisprudence, all capital tri-
als are bifurcated. If a capital defendant is convicted of
a crime for which the death penalty is a possible pun-
ishment (first-degree murder plus some special cir-
cumstance 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 pun-
ishment (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 anyevidence 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 differ-
ent from non-death-qualified juries in a number of
important ways. For one, death qualification pro-
duces juries that are less representative than non-
death-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 qual-
ification produces juries that hold a more homoge-
neous 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 aggravat-
ing 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 qual-
ification 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 non-
death-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.
In addition, research has shown that the process of
death qualification itself produces biasing effects
among persons exposed to it. That is, because it
requires jurors to consider the issues that would be ger-
mane only after they had found the defendant guilty
(e.g., whether they actually could impose the death
penalty) and to commit themselves to a course of
action that would occur only in the sentencing phase of
the trial (i.e., pledge to consider all punishment
options, including the death penalty)—before any evi-
dence has been presented, the process of death qualifi-
cation itself appears to increase prospective jurors’190 ———Death Qualification of JuriesD-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:41 PM Page 190