Week 3 Written Assignment
The empirical article that I reviewed is from 2011 by the authors from Nova Southern University, Diane L. Falco and Tina L. Freiburger. This is one of the 3 you offered for us to do.
OVERVIEW
The death penalty is the most severe punishment in the U.S. criminal justice system. Public support for the harsh policy is the number one reason for its continued use as the form of capital punishment. American public support of such a system needs a form of measurement to ensure that as the public opinion is scrutinized, it is also a representation of the public’s observation of the death penalty measure. Public support then needs to have a quantitative way of measuring opinion using the most up to date line of questions with more options to cover answers more rationally. This should be more precise than the old way of answering either “yes” or “no” to study questions.
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DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH PROBLEM Previous
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For example, individuals focused more on demographics of the victim and offender (e.g., age, gender, non-criminal behavior of the victim) than on legally relevant factors (e.g., multiple victims, act committed with other felonies) when deciding whether to sentence a defendant to death. When the considerations of age, gender and emotional factors were explained this often led to participants applying stricter standards to the circumstances that warranted an offense as death penalty eligible than the standards deemed by many states’ laws. Although each scenario was based on an actual death penalty case, several participants who supported the death penalty only supported it when the victim was a child or when there were multiple victims. Participants’ unwillingness to sentence offenders to death in the depicted scenarios may show that their standards are more severe than legal