May 26, 2006
Stereotypically 'Black-Looking' Criminals More Likely to Get Death Sentence
Male murderers with stereotypically ''black-looking'' features are more than twice as likely to get the death sentence than lighter-skinned African American defendants found guilty of killing a white person, Stanford researchers have found. The relationship between physical appearance and the death sentence disappears, however, when both murderers and their victims are black.
'Race clearly matters in criminal justice in ways in which people may or may not be consciously aware,'' said Jennifer Eberhardt, associate professor of psychology. ''When black defendants are accused of killing whites, perhaps jurors use the degree to which these defendants appear stereotypically black as a proxy for criminality, and then punish accordingly.''
''Employing the same analyses as we did for the cases with white victims, we found that the perceived stereotypicality of black defendants convicted of murdering black victims did not predict death sentencing,'' the authors write.
...defendants who were perceived to be more stereotypically black were more likely to be sentenced to death only when their victims were white,'' the study says.
According to Eberhardt, the lower rates of death penalty convictions may be attributed to the fact that jurors regard black-on-white crime as interracial conflict compared to black-on-black crime, which could be viewed as interpersonal.
[illus: Eugenics Archive\ not with press release]
Posted by Stubbornson at May 26, 2006 04:57 PM