Race Still A Factor In Death Penalty Cases

Results from the study were published in the article “Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes,” which appears in the May 2006 issue of Psychological Science, the journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Stanford University Psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt authored the piece along with Paul G. Davies, Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson.

Black defendants who are darker skinned and who have prominent African features, “like a broad nose and thick lips,” are more likely to receive the death penalty from jurors, than Blacks with lighter skin. “If you look more Black, it more than doubles your chances of receiving the death penalty when the victim is white,” Prof. Eberhardt said in a recent interview.

The study used photographs of defendants from death-eligible cases in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between 1979 and 1999: the accused had been found guilty, and the trial was already in the penalty phase. “We obtained the photographs of these Black defendants and presented all 44 of them (in a slide-show format) to naïve raters who did not know that the photographs depicted convicted murderers,” the authors write in their journal article about the study. “Raters were asked to rate the stereotypicality of each Black defendant’s” appearance and were told they could use any number of features (e.g., lips, nose, hair texture, skin tone) to arrive at their judgments.

“The raters were shown a black-and-white photograph of each defendant’s” face, it continues. The photographs were edited such that the backgrounds and image sizes were standardized, and only the face and a portion of the neck were visible. Raters were told that all the faces they would be viewing were of Black males. The defendants’ faces were projected one at a time onto a screen at the front of the room for four [seconds] each as participants recorded stereotypicality ratings using a scale from one (not at all stereotypical) to 11 (extremely stereotypical). In both sessions, raters were kept blind to the purpose of the study and the identity of the men in the photographs.”

More than 58 percent of defendants with African features were sentenced to death when convicted of killing a white person; only 24 percent of light-skinned Blacks convicted of killing a white person were sentenced to death. Eberhardt said that because many people still associate Blackness with criminality, as Black features are perceived, jurors appear more likely to choose the death penalty.

“It’s definitely a stereotype that social scientists have been documenting since the 1940s,” so not that much has changed for Blacks within the U.S. criminal justice system, even with the advances of the Civil Rights Movement, Eberhardt said. “We have an even stronger coupling of Blackness with criminality within the justice system these days.”

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