A recent study of the death penalty in Nevada compared the costs of defending capital and non-capital murder cases. The study, conducted by Dr. Terance Miethe of the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, looked at the time spent by defense attorneys at various stages of a case. The study’s findings included:
- Clark County public defense attorneys spent an average of 2,298 hours on a capital murder case compared to an average of 1,087 hours on a non-capital murder case--a difference of 1,211 hours, or 112%.
- Defending the average capital murder case in Clark County cost $229,800 for a Public Defender or $287,250 for appointed counsel. The additional cost of capital murder cases was $170,000 to $212,000 per case compared to the cost of a non-capital murder case in the same county.
- The 80 pending capital murder cases in Clark County will cost approximately $15 million more than if they were prosecuted without seeking the death penalty. More results below.
A new study conducted by researchers at Duke University found that the racial composition of jury pools has a profound effect on the probability of a black defendant being convicted. According to the study led by Professor Patrick Bayer of Duke, juries formed from all-white jury pools in Florida convicted black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants. In cases with no black potential jurors in the jury pool, black defendants were convicted 81 percent of the time, while white defendants were convicted 66 percent of the time. When at least one member of the jury pool was black, the conviction rates for white (73%) and black (71%) defendants were nearly identical. Professor Bayer commented, “I think this is the first strong and convincing evidence that the racial composition of the jury pool actually has a major effect on trial outcomes… Simply put, the luck of the draw on the racial composition of the jury pool has a lot to do with whether someone is convicted and that raises obvious concerns about the fairness of our criminal justice system.” The study examined over 700 non-capital felony cases in Sarasota and Lake counties in Florida and was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. 
Recently published historical research led by Professor Austin Sarat (pictured) of Amherst College examines the way gruesome executions were reported in the media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Prof. Sarat's study found that newspapers generally presented two competing narratives in their coverage: “a sensationalist narrative, which played up the gruesomeness of botched execution[s], and an opposing, recuperative narrative, which sought to differentiate [the] law’s violence from violence outside the law.” (Article abstract) Gruesome executions were put into a larger context of an orderly and justified punishmnet: "They situated such executions within a framework that justified capital punishment as the proper way to avenge violent crimes. Problems were attributed to unavoidable human errors or technological breakdowns, and executions, even when they became gruesome spectacles, generally did not seem to inflict undue suffering on the condemned." The report, Gruesome Spectacles: The Cultural Reception of Botched Executions in America, reviewed newspaper accounts of botched executions between 1890 and 1920, and was published in inaugural issue of the British Journal of American Legal Studies. 
On April 20, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks issued an historic ruling under the state's Racial Justice Act finding intentional bias by the state in selecting juries for death penalty cases. In what may be the first ruling of its kind in the country, the court held that “race was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise peremptory challenges during jury selection by prosecutors” at the time of Marcus Robinson’s (pictured) trial. Robinson’s death sentence was reduced to life without parole. Earlier this year, lawyers for Robinson presented statistical studies showing that race played an improper role in jury selection in capital cases across the state. The evidence included findings from a study conducted by law professors at Michigan State University that concluded that qualified black jurors were struck from juries at more than twice the rate of qualified white jurors in the state’s 173 capital cases between 1990-2010. Judge Weeks said that the disparity was strong enough “as to support an inference of intentional discrimination.” Many other North Carolina inmates have also challenged their death sentences on similar grounds.
A report released on April 18 by the prestigious National Research Council of the National Academies based on a review of more than three decades of research concluded that studies claiming a deterrent effect on murder rates from the death penalty are fundamentally flawed. The report concluded: “The committee concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates. Therefore, the committee recommends that these studies not be used to inform deliberations requiring judgments about the effect of the death penalty on homicide. Consequently, claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment." (emphasis added). Criminologist Daniel Nagin of Carnegie Mellon, who chaired the panel of experts, said, “We recognize this conclusion will be controversial to some, but nobody is well served by unfounded claims about the death penalty. Nothing is known about how potential murderers actually perceive their risk of punishment."
April 22 will mark the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp in which the Court rejected (5-4) a claim of racial bias based on a sophisticated statistical study of the death penalty in Georgia. Warren McCleskey, an African-American death row inmate convicted of killing a white police officer, presented the Court with analysis showing that defendants charged with killing white victims had odds of receiving a death sentence that were 4.3 times higher than defendants charged with killing black victims. McCleskey argued that his death sentence was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held, however, that the defendant had to show he was personally discriminated against in the course of the prosecution, and merely showing a disturbing pattern of racial disparities in Georgia over a long period of time was not sufficient to prove racial bias in his case. McCleskey also argued that when race is a factor in selecting who will die, the death penalty is unconstitutional under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment, but the Court decided the study offered was insufficient to prove that the death penalty was being applied in an arbitrary manner.