The Eighth Amendment's Lost Jurors: Death Qualification and Evolving Standards of Decency
Abstract
The Supreme Court’s inquiry into the constitutionality of the death penalty has overlooked a critical “objective indicator” of society’s “evolving standards of decency”: the rate at which citizens are excluded from capital jury service under Witherspoon v. Illinois due to their conscientious objections to the death penalty. While the Supreme Court considers the prevalence of death verdicts as a gauge of the nation’s moral climate, it has ignored how the process of death qualification shapes those verdicts. This blind spot biases the Court’s estimation of community norms and distorts its Eighth Amendment analysis.
This Article presents a quantitative study of Witherspoon strikes in real capital cases, measuring the strike rate in eleven Louisiana trials resulting in death verdicts from 2009 to 2013. Of the 1445 potential jurors questioned, 325 individuals (22.5%) were excluded from service on the basis of their opposition to the death penalty. These exclusions had a considerable impact on the racial composition of the jury pool: in the trials for which individualized information on race was available, one third of black venire members were struck under Witherspoon, and nearly sixty percent of those struck on this basis were black. These findings underscore the profound impact of death qualification upon the composition of capital juries and the outcomes of capital trials. Particularly in the wake of Justice Breyer’s recent call for reconsideration of the death penalty’s constitutionality, there is an urgent need for (a) systematized, ongoing data collection on Witherspoon strikes, and (b) formal consideration of the effect of death qualification in future Eighth Amendment analysis.