New research published in PLOS One sheds light on why the geographic distribution of death sentences in the United States is clustered in just a few jurisdictions. The findings indicate that a county’s legal and racial history plays a more important role than the homicide rate. “I’m a quantitative social scientist and have been working in the area of the death penalty since publishing a book on how arguments about the death penalty are framed, and the impact of the ‘innocence frame’ on public opinion,” said study author Frank R. Baumgartner , the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC Chapel Hill. His book, “ The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence ,” was published in 2008. “Since then, I’ve been continuing with various studies of the death penalty, and I constructed a database of everyone executed in the United States, including the county from which the case derived,” Baumgartner explained. “A shocking pattern is an extreme ...
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment