Abstract
Research on jury decision making in capital murder trials has revealed that extralegal, or irrelevant factors, such as victim ethnicity, defendant ethnicity, and even defendant’s physical appearance, may influence sentencing decisions, particularly when guilt phase evidence is ambiguous or weak. The purpose of this archival study was to examine the temporal characteristics, or length in days, of bifurcated capital murder trials in North Carolina between 1982 and 1999. Archival data were collected on 284 capital murder cases on appeal, based on standardized records in non- electronic Case Briefs which are routinely filed post-conviction with the North Carolina Supreme Court. In addition to descriptive data, data were analyzed by trial era (1982-1991 vs. 1992-1998), sentencing decision by the jury (life or death), and race of the defendant (white vs. non-white). Data were analyzed using Chi-Squared (?2) tests of independence and one-way ANOVAs. Results indicated that the length of capital trials increased only slightly between 1982 and 1998, and that defendants who got life were slightly younger than those who got death. Capital trials for non-white defendants were slightly shorter than trials for white defendants, and overall trial length did not vary by trial era. Finally, the overall length of a capital trial was most strongly correlated with the length of the guilt phase, while it was weakly related to the length of the sentencing phase.
How to Cite
Morgan, K., Mottern, D., Moyer, S. & Wolter, A., (2022) “Temporal Characteristics of Capital Murder Trials Between 1982-1998”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 35(1).
7
Views
2
Downloads