BASINGER

Alexander Basinger
Ms. Oberg
English 11
October 20, 2014

Considering the Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Death Penalty Sentences

On June 29, 1972 in the case of Furman v. Georgia, the United States Supreme Court
declared that the death penalty was unconstitutional. In their ruling, the Supreme Court found
that the application of capital punishment had been arbitrary and capricious, meaning that it
was not consistently and fairly applied and they forbid the use of the death penalty. At the time
they said, The death sentence [was being] disproportionately carried out on the poor, the
Negros, and members of unpopular groups. The court believed that the state statutes allowing
the death penalty as a punishment for crimes, and the ways juries and judges applied these
statutes were full of biases. They believed that this influenced a defendants chance, if they were
a poor person or a minority, to receive the death penalty.
However, this ban on capital punishment only lasted for four years, and it soon was
reinstated, in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). The Supreme Court upheld new laws in Georgia, Florida,
and Texas, believing that the problems they had identified four years earlier had been resolved.
They thought that these new laws had removed the biases against poor and minority defendants.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court was wrong. In this paper I will show that the biases against
poor defendants still exist. People from low socioeconomic status (SES) still receive the death
penalty more often for three primary reasons. First, many members of death penalty juries are

biased against poor defendants. Second, juries are more likely to sentence the defendant to the
death penalty when the victim is white, wealthy or female, especially when the defendant is not.
Finally, the quality of legal defense available to poor defendants is much lower than that
available to more wealthy defendants. The quality of legal defense offered in the trial has a
significant influence on the ultimate use of the death penalty in sentencing (American Civil
Liberties Union).
The death penalty has been used to discriminate based on race, religious view, and more
recently socioeconomic status (SES) with recent studies it has been shown that people with lower
SES are more likely to receive the death penalty through bias of the jury. In recent study
conducted by Divine and Caughlin (2014), through examining more than 4000 cases, they
showed that those with lower SES are more likely to receive the death penalty as punishment
when convicted of capital crimes. This study shows that there is a form of bias that affects the
sentence handed down by a jury when they perceive the defendant is poor. While this is a modest
affect, it clearly exists. This is not the only bias that affects the likelihood of someone with a low
SES to be sentenced to death, there is also the affect of how the defendant differs from the
victim.
Jury bias is also found in favor of the victim in the case when the person convicted of the
crime is of a different SES, race, or gender. For example, if the person convicted was African
American and the victim was white, then the jury is more likely to sentence the African
American person to death for his or her crime. In the case of McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) an
African American defendant was sentenced to death for killing a white police officer. His lawyer
was able to show that death sentences in Georgia were racially biased on the race of the victim.
Despite this evidence McClesky was executed by electrocution in 1991. Although in this

BASINGER

example the discrepancy between victim and defendant is racial, similar juror biases have been
seen when the defendant has a low SES and the victim was from a higher SES.
Despite all these facts showing the inappropriate biases of the jury the biggest factor in
my opinion that affects a person with low SES chances to receive the death penalty, are the
lawyers who the state hires for the task of defending a person with low SES. The fact is that,
Capital defense is now a highly specialized field requiring practitioners to successfully
negotiate minefield upon minefield of exacting and arcane death-penalty law, (Swarns). The
fact is that many, if not all the people who fall under the category of low SES are being given
inexperienced, and public defenders. These lawyers literally have the defendants lives in their
hands. The fact is that with all the biases against a person who has a low SES, it is much more
likely they will receive the death penalty.
Back in 1972 the Supreme Court ruled that death penalty was unconstitutional, but four
years later reinstated the death penalty saying the biases that made it unconstitutional were gone
from the justice system; this belief was wrong. The system is still biased. The bias, demonstrated
in the quality of lawyer, the status of the defendant and the low SES itself, means that juries are
more likely to hand down a death penalty sentence to those with low SES.

Works Cited
American Civil Liberties Union. Death Penalty 101. 3 October 2011. 25
October 2014 <https://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/death-penalty101>.
Devine, Dennis and David Caughlin. "Do They Matter? A Meta-Analytic
Inbvestigation of Individual Characteristics and Guilt Judgements."
Psychology, Public Policy and Law 20.2 (2014): 109-134.
Swarns, Christina. The Uneven Scales of Capital Justice. 18 July 2004. 20
October 2014 <prospect.org/article/uneven-scales-capital-justice>.