Photo credits: Loren Santow
Flash movie credit: Trey Thomas

The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence

Frank R. Baumgartner, Suzanna De Boef, and Amber Boydstun

Cambridge University Press, 2008

(Winner, Gladys Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on US national policy, 2008)

• Purchase the book from Cambridge University Press
• Purchase the book from Amazon.com
• Read a prospectus of the book.
• Download Datasets and Do-files associated with the analyses presented in the book, or see the original spreadsheets containing all the data to produce each of the figures in the book.

Published Reviews

• Review Symposium in Perspecitves on Politics (the official journal of the American Political Science Association), vol. 7, no. 4 (December 2009): 921-30. Reviews by James A. Morone; Robert Y. Shapiro; Marie Gottschalk; and Austin Sarat.
• Public Administration, 89, No. 2 (2011): 698–717, by David A. Rochefort.
• The International Journal of Press/Politics, 14 (2009): 134-140, by James N. Druckman
• Journal of Politics, 71 (2009): 1604-1606, by Rosalee A. Clawson
• International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Vol. 21, No. 4 (2009): 547-550, by Robert M. Bohm
• Criminal Justice Policy Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2009): , 507-508, by Tiffany Bergin
• Theoretical Criminology, Vol 13, no. 2, ( 2009): 259-62 by Alexander J. Blenkinsopp
• Law and Politics Book Review, Vol. 17, no. 8, July 27, 2008, by Priscilla H. M. Zotti
• Choice, August 2008, by M. A. Foley.
• Research Penn State, 2008, by Vicki Fong
• Contemporary Sociology 37, 5 (2008): 495, Take Note short reviews.

Mentions of our Project or Book in the Press and on the Blogs

• Death Penalty Fades As Hot-Button Issue, by Alan Greenblatt, NPR It's All Politics Blog, May 2, 2014.
• Race and Innocence in North Carolina: The New Chapter for the State Death Penalty, by Troy Homesley, Campus Blueprint, April 4, 2013
• How the Media is Killing the Death Penalty, Washington Post, March 17, 2013.
• The Decline of the Death Penalty, October 18, 2011, by Dimiter Toshkov on his blog: Rules of Reason: Uses and Abuses of Research on Public Policy and Administration.
• From the Monkey Cage:
  • September 23, 2011 about the possibility of change on gun control, by Bryan D. Jones
  • December 12, 2012 about Troy Davis, by John Sides
  • December 22, 2013 about the limits of framing, by Dan Hopkins, and further coverage that same day from the Huffington Post, by Jason Linkins.
• Innocence and the Death Penalty, by Matthew Yglesias, ThinkProgress, September 22, 2011.
• Research Penn State, 2009, Interview with Suzanna Linn, by Jesse Hicks
• University of Southern California newspaper story on panel discussion between Frank Baumgartner and Jody Amour, Professor at the USC School of Law, on the death penalty, February 13, 2009 (erratum: the author incorrectly quotes Baumgartner as saying that all the exonerated had served a minimum of 10 years in prison; this is close to the average, not the minimum.)
• Innocent Until Reported Guilty, by Steve Weinberg, September 23, 2008
• Put Your Best Facet Forward, Milo Public Affairs, January 2008
• StandDown Texas Project, October 19, 2007
• National Journal, April 2007
• Death Penalty Focus, September 2006.
• National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, posted November 2005
• Victims Family Members Crusade Against the Death Penalty, Austin American Statesman, October 29, 2005

A TV interview with Frank Baumgartner discussing the book

Friday, April 4, 2008, 5:30-6:00 pm, Pennsylvania Inside Out, from WPSX-TV. The segment begins with a discussion of the race for in Pennsylvania's 5th congressional distirct. Then, Patty Satalia talks with Penn State political scientist Frank Baumgartner about his new book The Decline of The Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence. Dowload and view the podcast. (mp4 format, 30 minutes of video)

The Decline of the Death Penalty in America, Panel Discussion

Presenter(s):Frank R. Baumgartner, Miller-LaVigne Professor of Political Science, Penn State Univ., Harold Wilson - Wrongfully Accused / Former Death Row Inmate, Reverand. Walter Everett; Speaker in Memory of His Son Lost to Murder, Andy Hoover, American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Event Moderator. click here to watch a video of the panel discussion, recorded at Penn State on March 25, 2008.Length: 1 Hour 27 Minutes 23 Seconds.

A Radio Interview with Baumgartner and Boydstun

Title: The Decline of the Death Penalty, Take Note Radio, with Patty Satalia, broadcast by WPSU-FM. Sunday, March 2, 2008, 7:30-8:00 AM. Guests: Frank Baumgartner, Amber Boydstun, & Andrew F. Susko (President of the Pennsylvania Bar Association). In theory, most Americans support the death penalty, but the possibility of mistakes and recent discoveries of innocence have led to historic shifts in public opinion and to a sharp decline in executions. Last fall, the American Bar Association released a study criticizing Pennsylvania's death penalty system. Is capital punishment on its deathbed? Click here to listen to the show (mp3 format, 28 minutes of audio)

An Audio Podcast from the 2011 Midwest Political Science Association meetings

Authors Meet Critics: The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (CUP, 2008) by Frank R. Baumgartner, Suzanna De Boef, and Amber Boydstun

Participants:

Stefaan Walgrave, University of Antwerp, Chair
Suzanna Linn De Boef, Pennsylvania State University
Amber Ellen Boydstun, University of California, Davis
Frank R. Baumgartner, Universitiy of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Robert S. Erikson, Columbia University
Mark S. Hurwitz, Western Michigan University
Dara Strolovitch, University of Minnesota

Research on Capital Punishment in America

Since 2003 Frank Baumgartner and colleagues have been involved in a project tracing the changing politics and issue-definitions associated with the death penalty. The question is to determine the degree to which the new "innocence" frame is displacing the traditional "morality" frame relating to this issue. Important substantive issues about the future of the death penalty in America can be addressed as well as difficult methodological issues concerning how to study the links among issue-definition, public opinion, the media, and public policy.

With Suzanna De Boef, graduate student Amber Boydstun, and occasional other collaborators on different parts of the project, Baumgartner and others have addressed a number of questions relating to these issues. The research has focused on substantive issues relating to how the media has covered the death penalty (with particular reference to the use of various frames), public opinion (in particular the cognitive process by which individuals react to the "moral" and the "innocence" frame, based on experiments), and the history of the issue since 1960.

• Read our article "Media Framing of Capital Punishment and Its Impact on Individuals' Cognitive Responses" (Frank E. Dardis, Frank R. Baumgartner, Amber E. Boydstun, Suzanna De Boef, and Fuyuan Shen), forthcoming, Mass Communication and Society 2007.
• Read our paper "The Decline of the Death Penalty: How Media Framing Changed Capital Punishment in America," in Brian F. Schaffner and Patrick J. Sellers, eds.  Winning with Words:  The Origins and Impact of Framing.  New York:  Routledge, 2009, pp. 159-84, based on a paper we presented at a conference at American University in June, 2007.
• Read an article entitled "Death and Innocence" published in the National Journal in April 2007 that focuses on some of our research.
  

Click on the links below to see various papers or presentations drawn from this project.

• The Discovery of Innocence. Presentation to Witness to Innocence, October 24, 2009.
• The Discovery of Innocence: Americans and the Death Penalty. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, Chicago IL, March 21, 2008.
• The Discovery of Innocence. Presentation to the Public Policy Institute of California, October 27, 2006.
  
• The Discovery of Innocence. Presentation to the UCLA Law School Conference on Wrongful Convictions, April 8, 2006.
  
• Issue-Definition and Policy Change: Capital Punishment and the Rise of the “Innocence Frame,” 1960–2003. Frank R.Baumgartner, Suzanna De Boef, and Amber E. Boydstun. Working paper, December 7, 2005.
  
• Framing Capital Punishment: Morality, Constitutionality, and Innocence, 1960-2003, a presentation to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Austin Texas, October 28, 2005.
  
  • See the Powerpoint presentation.
  • Read a longer background paper giving more detail.This paper presents the full results of our study, Comments are welcome.
    

• All Frames Are Not Equal: Framing and Conflict Displacement. Suzanna De Boef, Frank R. Baumgartner, Amber E. Boydstun, Frank E. Dardis, and Fuyuan Shen. This paper presents experimental evidence on the effectiveness of three different frames relating to the death penalty: the "innocence" frame as well as the traditional pro- and anti- "morality" frames. The paper was submitted for review to a professional journal in August 2005.
  
  • Read the Experimental Booklet that we distributed to the participants in our experiment. This explains all the questions they were asked, the stories each group read, and further details relating to our experiment.
    

• An Evolutionary Factor Analysis Approach to the Study of Issue-Definition. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 15-18, 2004. (with Suzanna De Boef and Amber E. Boydstun) [updated May 11, 2004]
  
  • This paper focuses on a methodology to study framing based on evolutionary factor analysis: factor analysis conducted repeatedly over short windows of time, so that we can trace the rise of new issue-definitions dynamically.
    
  • (Click here to see the original version.) The updated version simply has the formatting and graphs improved. We recommend the corrected version but there are no substantive or textual differences between the two.
    

Much of the work makes use of a comprehensive coding of New York Times coverage of the death penalty from 1960 to present.

• Click here to read the codebook that explains in detail the arguments coded and other technical information about this aspect of the project.

Some Power Point presentations have given overviews of some findings:

• From "Justice" to Mistake: Changing Public Understandings of the Death Penalty in the United States, presentation to the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence, November 22, 2004.
• Justice, Retribution, or Mistake? The Changing Tones of Media Coverage of Capital Punishment in the US. Presentation to 24th Annual NAACP-LDF Capital Punishment Training Conference, Airlie Conference Center, Warrenton, VA, July 17-20, 2003 (with Cheryl Feeley and Amber Boydstun)
  
• Justice, Retribution, or Mistake? Discussing the Death Penalty in America. Powerpoint presentation to The Justice Project, Washington, DC May 15, 2003 (with Cheryl Feeley and Amber Boydstun)

Current Research and Work in Progress

In 2009 Baumgartner moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He continues his research on capital punishment both in North Carolina and nationally. Below are bits of research in progress from 2009 onwards. In 2017 with a set of student co-authors, much of this ongoing research was published in a new book, Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty. Click here to go to the web page for that book.

Letters to the editor and guest newspaper columns about capital punishment in North Carolina and nationally

• Arkansas plans to execute 7 men in 11 days. They’re likely to botch one. WashingtonPost.com Monkey Cage, April 14, 2017 (Frank R. Baumgartner and Kaneesha Johnson)
• Does the death penalty target people who are mentally ill? We checked. WashingtonPost.com Monkey Cage, April 3, 2017 (Frank R. Baumgartner and Betsy Neill)
• Coverage in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, from April 10, 2017: Pena di morte, a Gaza impiccati tre "traditori" e negli Usa esecuzioni anche ai malati di mente
• U.S. executions and death sentences dropped dramatically in 2016 — except in a few hotspots. WashingtonPost.com Monkey Cage, January 27, 2017. (Frank R. Baumgartner, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Emily Williams). Supplemental materials.
• Forty Years of Experience with the “New and Improved” Death Penalty, 1976–2016, The American Prospect, July 5, 2016.
• Americans are turning against the death penalty. Are politicians far behind? WashingtonPost.com Monkey Cage, December 7, 2015 (Frank R. Baumgartner, Emily Williams and Kaneesha Johnson). Data. Codebook.
• The death penalty is about to go on trial in California. Here’s why it might lose. WashingtonPost.com Monkey Cage, August 5, 2015.
• The number of lethal injections is declining. That’s what history would predict. WashingtonPost.com Monkey Cage, June 29, 2015.
• Most death penalty sentences are overturned. Here’s why that matters. WashingtonPost.com Monkey Cage, March 17, 2015. (Frank R. Baumgartner and Anna W. Dietrich)
  • To read this post in Italian, click here.
  • Commentaries on our piece:
  • CrimeAndConsequences.com, March 17, 2015
  • ABAJournal.com, March 18, 2015
  • TheCrimeReport.org, March 18, 2015
  • AllGov.com, March 20, 2015
  • Racial reconciliation demands Christians reconsider the death penalty, by Antipas L. Harris, April 1, 2015, Religion News Service
  • See the US Supreme Court decision in Glossip v. Gross (2015), in which Justice Breyer refers to our study in his dissent. (Search for "Baumgartner" in the text.)
    
• North Carolina’s rickety, unreliable death penalty, Raleigh News and Observer, February 14, 2015
• NC’s death penalty: Going, going, good riddance. North Carolina Policy Watch, November 18, 2013
• Governor must veto RJA repeal, Winston Salem Journal, December 8, 2011
• Detecting bias essential in death penalty cases, The Burlington Times-News, November 26, 2011
  
• On the decline: murders and death sentences, Raleigh News & Observer, October 31, 2010.
• Four similar Op-Eds relating to the crisis in the state crime lab as it relates to the death penalty from September 2010.
  • Death Penalty Moratorium is Not Enough, Chapel Hill News, October 10, 2010
  • Time to Commute N.C.'s Death Sentences. Carrboro Citizen, September 20, 2010.
  • N.C. Should Commute Death Sentences, Herald-Sun, September 16, 2010.
  • The Death of the Death Penalty at Hand? Asheville Citizen-Times, September 16, 2010.
• In N.C., only 20 percent of condemned are executed. Charlotte Observer, March 5, 2010.
  • Read a longer version of a report on death row reversals which forms the basis for the Observer article above.
• Death penalty's vanishing point? Raleigh News & Observer, January 24, 2010.
• NC’s death penalty: Going, going, good riddance. North Carolina Policy Watch, November 18, 2013.

Research reports, presentations, and research in progress.

• Memo concerning disparities in death sentencing by the race and gender of the victim, March 20, 2010
• Link here for information concerning the April 7, 2010 event at UNC-Chapel Hill on Race, Wrongful Convictions, and Redemption
• See the slides that I presented on Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina at that April 7 event
• Link here for information concerning the March-April 2010 series of events on Race, Wrongful Convictions, and the Death Penalty in North Carolina at the Wake Forest School of Law, UNC-CH, Fayetteville State Univesity, and North Carolina A&T University.
• See some analysis I did in October 2010 relating to the geographical distribution of executions from 1976 to present. Click to download either the overview paper or a spreadsheet showing every state and county in the US with its number of executions
• Link to a blog post by Robert Smith with maps based on the data on executions by county referenced above.
• Frank R. Baumgartner and Isaac Unah, The Decline of Capital Punishment in North Carolina. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, November 17-20, 2010, San Francisco.
• In 2010-11, I supervised the senior thesis of Alissa Ellis entitled Executing the Vulnerable Among Us: An Analysis of Mental Capacity, Mental Illness and the Death Penalty in North Carolina. Alissa reviews the history of executions in North Carolina since 1900 with a focus on issues relating to the mentally handicapped and the mentally ill.
• In 2011-12 I supervised Lindsey Stephens in her senior thesis entitled Indigent Defense Funding and its Effect on Capital Punishment in North Carolina, 1976-Present. Lindsey analyzes the impact of the creation of the state-wide office of Indigent Defense Services on the decline of the use of the death penalty in North Carolina.
• Prof. Matthew Robinson of Appalachian State University has compiled this report on the state of social science research on the death penalty in North Carolina. On April 19, 2011, he was interviewed on WUNC radio's State of Things to summarize the results.
• Two analyses of the geographical distribution of US executions from 1977 to April 2011, from April 28, 2011:
  • First, a series of maps that show the distribution of executions by county, entitled Where the executions are.
  • Second, a statistical analysis of the data underlying the maps above that show that, for states, for counties, and for counties at different historical time periods, the distribution is a statistical "power law." This implies that the process that leads to an execution has more to do with how many executions have previously been administered in that jurisdiction than other factors. This presentation is entitled "A Power Law of Death." Click here for an updated version of that presentation given in March 2012 at Georgetown University.
  • You can see a video of my presentation of the Power Law of Death at the Santa Fe Institute on August 18 2011 by clicking here, then browsing through the various presentations. Click here to see the slides from that presentation.
• "Deathwatch: Are capital punishment’s days numbered?" by Susan Hardy, ©2011 Endeavors magazine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This article reviews UNC researchers Baumgartner, Unah, and Boger who have been involved in studies of race and the death penalty relating to the Racial Justice Act and to the puzzle of the decline of the death penalty. Published April 26, 2011.
• See my new database consisting of information about every execution in the US since 1976.
• Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina, presentation at Appalachian State University, November 6, 2012.
• Public Policy Responses to Wrongful Convictions. Forthcoming in Examining Wrongful Convictions: Stepping Back, Moving Forward, edited by James Acker et al., Carolina Academic Publishing, 2014.  (Frank R. Baumgartner, Saundra D. Westervelt, and Kimberly J. Cook)
• The Hierarchy of Victims in Death Penalty Processing. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, Wilmington DE, March 13–15, 2014. (Frank R. Baumgartner, Seth Kotch, and Isaac Unah)
• Senior Thesis of Anna Dietrich from 2014 on the surprisingly high rates at which death sentences are later overturned on review by higher courts. Nationally, only about 20-25 percent of death sentences are eventually carried out, and this rate varies widely by state. (See above for a MonkeyCage post from March 17, 2015 based on this thesis, with updated numbers)
• The Mayhem of Wrongful Liberty: Documenting the Crimes of True Perpetrators in Cases of Wrongful Incarceration. Paper presented at the Innocence Network Conference, Portland OR, April 11-12 2014. (Frank R. Baumgartner, Amanda Grigg, Rachelle Ramìrez, Kenneth J. Rose, and J. Sawyer Lucy)
  • Click here to see a recent blog post about our paper from the Wrongful Convictions Blog
  • Click here to see another blog post from Dare To Think
• North Carolina’s Wasteful Experience with the Death Penalty. 1 February, 2015. (See an OpEd above from 14 February 2015 based on this analysis as well.)
• An interview on WUNC radio: Why Have There Been No Executions In North Carolina? By Phoebe Judge, 10 April 2015. Or download the audio interview directly here (7 minutes, mp3 format)
• Does a death sentence always mean death? By Charlotte McDonald BBC News, 23 May 2015, or related radio interview on More or Less from that same date. More or Less is a show that reviews the use of data in the news, and the question is whether Bryan Stevenson's comment that we have exonerated one person from death row for every nine people executed was accurate.
• Places with more executions should in theory have more murders. They don't. By German Lopez, December 9, 2015, Vox.com.
• Geographic Disparities in US Capital Punishment. Paper presented at the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy Spring 2016 Symposium: Death Penalty in America Post-Glossip, Durham, NC, February 19, 2016. (Frank R. Baumgartner, Woody Gram, Kaneesha Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin Wilson)
• The Geographic Distribution of US Executions. Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy 11, 1&2, forthcoming 2016. (Baumgartner, Frank R., Woody Gram, Kaneesha R. Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin P. Wilson.) (This is the revised version of the workshop paper listed above.
  
  

An idea of the vocabulary we use in the book, courtesy of wordle.net:

updated: April 14, 2017