Criminal probability race
The study’s findings build upon past research that Lyman, Baumgartner, and Pierce conducted on Louisiana’s death penalty system. These findings, they write, show that despite being legally irrelevant, a victim’s race and gender are “highly important predictors” of sentencing outcomes. Homicides with a Black suspect and victim have “about a 10% chance of proceeding to final capital charges.” In similarly situated cases, this probability “increases to approximately 40%” in cases with Black male suspects and white female victims. After comparing otherwise similar homicide cases with Black suspects and victims to cases with Black male suspects and white female victims, they found that Black male suspects with white female victims are almost five times more likely to face a final charge of first-degree murder, and therefore be eligible for the death penalty in Louisiana. The researchers found that sentencing disparities were even more pronounced when both race and gender were considered. Black-on-Black crimes, by contrast, represent a smaller share at each stage of the process.” (Click to enlarge image above.) They write that “having a white victim doubled the probability of a death sentence for a white suspect” but Black defendants charged with killing white victims “were 8.6 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those suspected of killing blacks.” Cases with white victims, are much more likely to have harsher outcomes, particularly Black-on-White crimes. The researchers found “as the cases move through the successive filters of the capital prosecution process, the racial characteristics change dramatically. The vast majority of cases (79%) that were initially capitally charged had charges reduced before the end of the prosecution and only 107 of the cases in the study eventually resulted in death sentences. Comparing capitally charged homicides to those that were not capitally charged, they examined legally relevant factors (number of victims, age of victims, and other measures of severity) and those that were legally irrelevant (race, gender, location) in cases in which capital charges were dropped or reduced, and in those that proceeded as capital. The authors sought to determine if the racial disparities uncovered in their previous research could be explained by legally relevant circumstances. In this new study, the researchers reviewed more than 6,000 homicides, of which 1,822 were capitally charged. Their previous research on Louisiana’s application of the death penalty showed significant disparities in the sentencing outcomes of defendants with white victims as compared to those with Black victims. Baumgartner, and Northeastern University criminologist Glenn L. The study, Race and Gender Disparities in Capitally-Charged Louisiana Homicide Cases, 1976-2014, published in the Southern University Law Review, was conducted by Northeastern University researcher Tim Lyman, University of North Carolina political scientist Frank R. “Our powerful and consistent findings of racial and gender-based disparities hold in a multivariate analysis and are inconsistent with the equal protection of the law or any common understanding of equality or justice.” “The Louisiana death penalty system is heavily weighted by a tendency to seek the harshest penalties in those cases with white female victims,” the study found. Louisiana prosecutors were more than five times as likely to seek the death penalty, and juries more than five times as likely to impose it, in cases involving a Black male offender and a white female victim than in crimes in which both the alleged offender and the victim were Black. Louisiana’s death penalty is disproportionately imposed in cases involving white female victims, especially if the defendant in the case is a Black man, a new study by three leading death-penalty researchers has confirmed.