Prior research on arbitrariness in capital sentencing suggests that impermissible factors still influence jury decisions of life or death even under sentencing guidelines approved by the Court. Unfortunately, there is almost no direct evidence on the question of arbitrariness and standards in capital sentencing from research designed to see how such sentencing decisions are actually made. This study attempts to extend our understanding of the process of penalty decision making through an analysis of interviews conducted with 117 capital jurors in the state of Florida who participated in both the guilt and penalty phases of a capital homicide trial between 1988 and 1991. The findings of this analysis suggest that statutory aggravating and mitigating factors had little influence on jurors' penalty decisions. Instead, jurors appeared to be influenced by legally proscribed considerations and tended to attach aggravating labels to factors which should appropriately be used in mitigation of a death sentence. The data generally portray a troubling picture of the operation of Florida's current capital penalty statutes and indicate that Florida's new statute has failed to eliminate the arbitrariness in the sentencing of capital defendants. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-04, Section: A, page: 1503. / Major Professor: Gordon P. Waldo. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77399 |
| Contributors | Goetz, Julie Ann., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 176 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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