Photocopy of typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Criminal justice administrators in the United States have been challenged by a highly visible accusation of racial discrimination. This perception has weakened the confidence in, and support of, our judicial process. This study attempted to clarify this perception by examining the effect of race on certain judicial decisions related to the death penalty. The variables chosen for analysis focused on the persons involved in the homicide, the circumstances of the crime, and decisions made during the processing of capital cases.

Justice Thurgood Marshall proposed a three-pronged postulate in his dissent in1972 in the Furman v. Georgia (408 U.S. 238) Supreme Court case. The American public is generally uninformed when it comes to the death penalty, and given information a "great mass of citizens" would be against it, unless their underlying beliefs were rootedin retribution (Furman v. Georgia, p. 363). These statements subsequently came to be known as the Marshall Hypothesis, and were deemed testable by researchers. This study examines the influence on death penalty opinion as a consequence of participating in a college class on the death penalty. Students in the class, who were either criminology majors or minors, were asked to take part in a questionnaire regarding their attitudes toward capital punishment at the beginning and at the end of the semester.Over the course of the class, students took part in a pre and post-test designed to measure their knowledge of the death penalty. This study correlated the amount of knowledge gained by each student with their respective death penalty attitudes. Results indicated that many in the class had little knowledge of the practice, application, and corollary effects of capital punishment. Those students who made the greatest amount of knowledge gains also reported a reduction in support for capital punishment. The acceptance of death penalty truths was not found to be related to a reduction in death penalty support. Further analysis, however, showed that those students who accepted these death penalty “truths” were also able to disregard death penalty “myths.” The present study concludes that support for the death penalty is directly reduced through increased knowledge gain, and indirectly reduced through truth acceptance as a function of death penalty “myth” abandonment.

This study focuses on the influence of mitigating circumstances on the sentencing outcome before and after the McKoy (1990) decision. In McKoy (1990) the Supreme Court decided that the jurors did not have to find mitigating circumstances unanimously. Results are reported based on a sample of North Carolina first-degree murder cases where the state sought the death penalty. Logistic regression is used to determine the importance of mitigating circumstances as predictors of jury decision-making in North Carolina, controlling for the variety of other factors that influence that decision. The descriptive statistics show that the average number of mitigating circumstances submitted and accepted had doubled in the post-McKoy cases. At the same time, the number of aggravating circumstances presented and submitted stayed about the same. The analysis then moved to the consideration of the impact of mitigating circumstances, and whether there had been a change between the two eras. Separate logistic regression analysis revealed that there had indeed been a shift in the effects of aggravation and mitigation, but no in the manner that might have been anticipated, Specifically, in the post-McKoy era, mitigating circumstances had a diminished impact on the probability of a death sentence while, conversely, aggravating circumstances carried an increased impact.

This study is an exploration and extension of previous research on the interactive effects of victim-race and victim-gender on death sentence outcomes. Williams and Holcomb's (2004) study suggests that an interactive effect exists between victim-race and victim-gender on Ohio death sentencing outcomes, such that killers of White women are especially singled out for capital punishment. The current study analyzes a sample of death eligible cases at the trial level in North Carolina to determine if Williams & Holcomb's findings hold up for a different sample of cases and in a different state. Logistic regression is used to determine if there are direct and/or interactive effects of victim's race and victim's gender on capital sentencing outcomes, controlling for the variety of other factors that influence that decision. Results suggest that the interactive effects reported by Williams and Holcomb do not exist in North Carolina at the sentencing/penalty processing phase of capital trials.

New Zealand prisons were a colonial construct established by early colonial administrations to deal with criminal behaviour occurring at the time of European settlement. Like the prison system, prison chaplaincy also had its origins in colonial experiences from the United Kingdom where chaplains were employed to meet the spiritual needs of those in institutions such as schools, hospitals, colleges, the military and legations. This thesis addressed the question of how the partnership between Church and State administrators in New Zealand for the provision of chaplaincy services developed between 1840 and 2006. Four phases were identified in the evolution of prison chaplaincy: phase one 1840-to-1950, characterised by ad hoc arrangements between clergy and local prison management; phase two 1951-to-1989 when Secretary for Justice Samuel Barnett established a formal relationship with the National Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church to provide chaplains for penal institutions; phase three identified as ‘prisons in change’ 1990-1999, when the Interim Chaplaincy Advisory Board and Prison Chaplaincy Advisory Board worked in tandem with the Departments of Justice and Corrections to administer the Prison Chaplaincy Service, arising from the recommendations of the Roper and Perry Reports; and phase four 2000-to-2006, a period when the Prison Chaplaincy Service of Aotearoa New Zealand was contracted to the Department of Corrections to employ prison chaplains. The research adopted a multi-faceted approach, consisting of phenomenology, ethno-methodology and hermeneutics to understand attitudes and experiences of key players and institutions in the evolution of Prison Chaplaincy. Data was collected through interviews of key informants, critical evaluation of published and unpublished material in public and private collections. The study identified six key factors that influenced the development of Prison Chaplaincy in New Zealand. These were: the nature of the Church-State interface, the impact of biculturalism, the influence of theological and ecclesiastical trends, and the impact of inter-church politics, the influence of socio economic trends and developments, and changes in Government policy. It also found that while there were tensions, the Church-State partnership had positive benefits for the spiritual outcomes for prisoners.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-192).

Since its discovery in 1984, psychological investigators have continued to explore the Flynn Effect, the phenomenon of consistent and secular IQ gains within industrialized nations approximating 0.3 points per year. The most contentious debate within this field of research surrounds the purported cause of the Effect, and yet the research literature lacks a synthesis of the leading causal theories and the evidence supporting them. The principal hypothesized causal mechanisms – psychometric artifact, educational intervention, environmental changes, nutrition, genetics, gene-environment interaction model, medical improvements, and the multiplicity hypothesis – are reviewed and analyzed within the larger breadth of Flynn Effect scholarly literature. Flynn Effect causal investigation has not yielded any decisive results, and the unproductive postulation of causal theories has recently stagnated, so researchers must accept a necessary shift in the focus of their research toward a more collaborative and holistic understanding of the Effect in order to effectively determine its causes. Extensive social implications of the Effect within the scopes of special education and judicial policy necessitate the expedited revitalization of Flynn Effect research such that contemporary society may be better able to appropriately incorporate the Effect into public policy.

This study is an investigation of whether familial relationships among offenders and their victims affect capital sentencing. Using a sample of capital cases from North Carolina restricted to familial homicides, logistic regression models are used while controlling for legal and extra-legal factors that influence decision outcomes. Such models of capital sentencing are developed to (1) determine whether familial-victim cases have unique correlates; and (2) whether there are variations in the effects of these correlates across gender. Contradictory to these hypotheses, results suggest that acquaintance and stranger relationships are less likely to receive a capital outcome when compared to familial relationships. Therefore, in North Carolina it appears that familial relationships receive capital outcomes more frequently than other types of victim-offender relationships.

Several justifications exist for the death penalty, yet it is only recently that the concept of “closure” has come to serve as a rationale for American capital punishment. This contemporary justification promises murder victims’ families that the execution of their loved one’s murderer should provide them with “closure”—a contested word that typically denotes an end to the pain associated with their loved one’s murder. How and when this new narrative came about has garnered little scholarly attention, particularly as murder victims’ families begin to challenge closure as relevant to their healing. The goals of the current study seek to: 1) elucidate how closure entered the American death penalty debate; 2) illustrate the myriad meanings assigned to closure, identifying how various stakeholders have trafficked in the term’s use; 3) examine how closure has been used politically to legitimize death penalty practices and the state’s right to take life; and 4) critically analyze claims that closure has “symbolically transformed” the American death penalty today. The study employs discursive textual analysis of nearly 2500 American newspaper stories from 1989 to 2008, legislative hearings, legal case histories, academic and popular sources, and archival materials from American death penalty and victims’ rights groups during this twenty year period. The findings illustrate that closure entered death penalty discourse in the late 1980s, and reached a tipping point in news coverage in 2001 with Timothy McVeigh’s execution. While the term was used in nearly every way imaginable, the findings illustrate it was most prominently used in supporting secondary victims’ “right to view” the executions of their loved ones’ murderers and in justifying Timothy McVeigh’s execution for his role in the Oklahoma City Bombing. I argue that the media’s sensational portrayals of such historical moments allowed them to serve as “galvanizing events” ushering in closure as a powerful symbol in justifying the state’s right to take life and the view that executions are a form of “therapeutic justice.” Despite closure being used to support certain death penalty practices, the analyses presented here provide little support for the notion that closure has “symbolically transformed” American capital punishment today as has been suggested by some scholars. Closure is a small blip in print news coverage and does not resonate strongly with Americans’ support for capital punishment in national opinion polls. The study concludes with a critical examination of the role of closure as a contemporary, and empirically unchallenged, justification for the death penalty—one that serves as an empty promise for murder victims’ loved ones. / text