(Press-News.org) Broad political, economic, and social factors influence disciplinary punishment. In particular, over the last half century, such considerations have shaped jurisdictions' use of the death penalty, which has declined considerably since the 1990s. A new study examined the factors associated with use of the death penalty at the county level to provide a fuller picture of what issues influence court outcomes. The study concludes that partisan politics, religious fundamentalism, and economic threat influenced local decisions about the death penalty. The study also found that the size of the African American population, which prior state-level studies have found to be associated with use of the death penalty, was not directly associated with the recent decline in the use of this punishment.
The study, by researchers at Missouri State University and American University, will appear in Criminology, a publication of the American Society of Criminology.
"It is essential to examine the local political environment and the composition of jurisdictional populations to capture the processes that influence local trial court outcomes," suggests Ethan Amidon, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Missouri State University, who led the study. "Although we found support for a number of perspectives that have been identified in prior state-level studies, our findings indicate that these relationships are more complex when considered at the local, decision-making level."
In the last 30 years, national reliance on the death penalty has declined across all states--from a late 20th century peak of 330 death sentences in 1994 to 32 death sentences in 2016. Most counties have also used the death penalty less.
In this study, researchers examined a variety of issues associated with the use of death sentences across three decennial periods from 1990 to 2010. They studied information from 2,572 counties or county equivalents, using information from the U.S. Census Bureau's decennial reports and its American Community Survey; they also considered information from a database that contains death sentences by county from 1991 to 2017. Prior research has studied this information primarily from a state perspective.
Among the factors examined were the percentages of people in each county who voted for the Republican presidential candidate, were religious fundamentalists (based on church membership data), were of different races and ethnicities, and were unemployed. The study measured each county's tradition of vigilantism by tallying the lynching rate in each jurisdiction.
To control for factors that could influence the use of the death penalty, the study considered several variables, including each county's number of homicides, rate of violent crime (homicides, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults), and rate of property crime (burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts). The study also considered total population and income inequality, as well as rates of divorce and poverty in each county.
The researchers concluded that several factors are associated with county-level reliance on the death penalty:
The degree of public support for Republican presidential candidates was directly associated with greater reliance on the death penalty over the study period. Given that the death penalty has declined over the last three decades, this means that the decrease in the use of this punishment was more gradual in jurisdictions with a growth in support for Republican presidential candidates, who tend to espouse law and order positions.
Counties with larger Protestant fundamentalist populations imposed death sentences to a greater degree, on average, than counties with smaller such populations. This contributes to a degree of persistence in the death penalty in jurisdictions where citizens remain strongly committed to fundamentalist ideologies.
The size of economically marginalized populations within counties was directly related to greater reliance on the death penalty. This relationship inverted once the size of the unemployed population reached a tipping point.
Neither the size of a county's African American and Hispanic populations nor its history of vigilantism was directly related to its jurisdictional use of the death penalty. However, the size of the African American population was associated indirectly with reliance on the death penalty in terms of its influence on jurisdictional unemployment.
The authors note their study is missing data on factors such as the percentage of religious fundamentalists and crime rate variables, and a few of the measurement procedures used by some of their sources changed across the study period, including those that provided crime data.
"Even as reliance on capital punishment has waned in the early 21st century, the nature and severity of penal punishments have continued to be shaped by the broader social, political, and economic landscapes in which they are immersed," according to John Eassey, a researcher in residence in the Justices Programs Office at American University, who coauthored the study.
INFORMATION:
CHAPEL HILL, NC -- In a viewpoint perspective published in JAMA on March 9, 2021, a University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher and two other experts endorsed the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) requirement for a patient and their doctor to engage in a shared discussion of benefits and harms before proceeding with a low-dose spiral computed tomography (LDCT) scan as a method for preventing lung cancer death. An accompanying evidence report detailed the benefits and harms from screening, suggesting that shared decision-making between a patient ...
URBANA, Ill. - If you haven't been the parent or caregiver of an infant in recent years, you'd be forgiven for missing the human milk oligosaccharide trend in infant formulas. These complex carbohydrate supplements mimic human breast milk and act like prebiotics, boosting beneficial microbes in babies' guts.
Milk oligosaccharides aren't just for humans, though; all mammals make them. And new University of Illinois research suggests milk oligosaccharides may be beneficial for cats and dogs when added to pet diets.
But before testing the compounds, scientists had to find them.
"When we first looked into this, there had only been one study on milk oligosaccharides in dogs, and none in domestic cats. The closest were really small studies on a single lion and a single ...
In a new study in PNAS, an international team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology has shown that Arabidopsis thaliana plants produce beta-cyclocitral when attacked by herbivores and that this volatile signal inhibits the methylerythritol 4-phosphate (MEP) pathway. The MEP pathway is instrumental in plant growth processes, such as the production of pigments for photosynthesis. In addition to down-regulating the MEP pathway, beta-cyclocitral also increases plant defenses against herbivores. Since the MEP pathway is only found in plants and microorganisms, but not animals, knowledge of a signal molecule like beta-cyclocitral opens up new possibilities for the development ...
Brazilian researchers who study a native venomous fish have confirmed a route to drug development for the treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis and asthma.
The venomous toadfish Thalassophryne nattereri contains a peptide (TnP) with anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic potential. Confirmation of this potential has now come via the zebrafish Danio rerio, a popular aquarium species native to South Asia that shares 70% of its genome with humans and is widely used as a model for in vivo trials in drug development.
The researchers tested TnP in D. rerio to measure its toxicity. In a little over a year, their research showed that the peptide is safe. It did not cause cardiac dysfunction or neurological problems in the toxicity tests ...
Health care systems could save lives and minimize losses by optimizing resource allocation and implementing mitigation strategies, according to two new studies. Colorado State University researchers explored how our health care systems might perform under multiple disasters and multiple waves of COVID-19, and how we can keep them functioning when we need them most.
In the first study, published in Nature Communications, Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. student Emad Hassan and Associate Professor Hussam Mahmoud investigated the compound effects of pandemics and natural disasters on health care systems. They combined wildfire ...
DALLAS (March 9, 2021) - Better brain health and performance for humankind is one step closer to reality with the successful trial of the groundbreaking BrainHealth Project. A cross-disciplinary team with the Center for BrainHealth® at The University of Texas at Dallas unveiled an easy-to-use online platform that delivers a novel, science-backed approach to measuring, improving and tracking one's own brain fitness.
A key innovation of the Project centers on the BrainHealth Index™ (BHI), which is based on a multidimensional definition of brain health and its upward potential. The BHI is a composite derived from a series of best-in-class assessments that explore ...
Farmers in the Midwest may be able to bypass the warming climate not by getting more water for their crops, but instead by adapting to climate change through soil management says a new study from Michigan State University.
"The Midwest supplies 30% of the world's corn and soybeans," said Bruno Basso, an ecosystems scientist and MSU Foundation Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences within the College of Natural Science. "These crops are sensitive to temperature and water changes."
Previous studies have suggested that by 2050, the Midwest will need about 35% more water to sustain its current levels of corn and soybean yields. But research done by Basso and colleagues found that the data does not support this idea. The Midwest is in a unique location that ...
If past natural disasters have taught us anything about their effects on pregnant women and developing babies, it is to pay close attention, for the added stress will surely have an impact on them. Amanda Venta, associate professor of psychology at the University of Houston, is sounding that alarm as it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic in a newly released study published in Child Psychiatry & Human Development.
"There is strong evidence to suggest that the coronavirus pandemic will affect mothers and infants through immune pathways that, in previous research, have been shown to link stress and social isolation during the pre- and post-natal periods with deficits in maternal mental health and infant well-being and development across developmental stages," reports Venta.
Research ...
The relationship between the Hawaiian bobtail squid and the bioluminescent bacteria living in its light organ has been studied for decades as a model of symbiosis. Now researchers have used a powerful chemical analysis tool to identify a small molecule produced by the bacteria that appears to play an important role in their colonization of the light organ.
The study, published March 9 in the journal mBio, adds a new wrinkle to scientists' understanding of the chemical signaling involved in this iconic symbiotic relationship. "It's exciting that there are still new things to discover, even in such a well-studied system," said corresponding author Laura Sanchez, associate professor ...
A new systematic review of evidence recommends the use of behavioral self-management treatments for common urinary issues experienced by upwards of 70 percent of older men. Common symptoms include trouble urinating, increased frequency and incontinence. These symptoms can have a substantial negative impact on sleep, social functioning and quality of life. Several guidelines recommend self-management techniques like health education, advice on fluid intake, and bladder retraining; however, in practice, self-management is often excluded from the menu of treatment options that include medication and surgery.
Researchers at Bond University's Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare found that self-management interventions reduced the severity of lower urinary tract symptoms. The ...
