Deadly Justice
A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty
Frank R. Baumgartner, Marty Davidson, Kaneesha R. Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin P. Wilson
Oxford University Press, 2018
About the Authors
As described more fully in the Epilogue, this book results from a long-term research project led by Baumgartner. Over the years, his research and teaching on this topic have become fully connected. Davidson, Johnson, Krishnamurthy, and Wilson are all former UNC students who took Baumgartner's course, then stayed involved with the project over the following two years to such an extent that, by the time they left UNC, they had became true collaborators. Neill and Cole worked extensively on the single chapter for which they are credited with co-authorship. In the years since we worked on the book, the students have moved on to some of the nation's best graduate programs, are laying the foundations for their careers in the law, social work, and in other fields.
Frank R. Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. He continues to teach about the death penalty and recently published a book with two graduate students about racial disparities in traffic stops. Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race won the best book award in 2019 from the APSA Section on Law and Courts.
Marty Davidson graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May of 2016 and is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and is working on his dissertation on racial disparities in criminal justice.
Kaneesha Johnson graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May of 2016 and is a PhD student in Government at Harvard University, where her dissertation project focuses on the collateral consequences of involvement in the criminal justice system. During 2021-22, she is doing an LLM degree at the University of Chicago Law School.
Arvind Krishnamurthy graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in December of 2016 and is now a student in the PhD program in Political Science at Duke University, where he is studying political behavior, race and ethnic politics, and political methodology. His ongoing research is focused on race and the politics of criminal justice.
Colin Wilson graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May of 2016, worked for two years as a paralegal at Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC, a civil rights law firm in Washington, D.C., doing statistical analyses for employment and housing discrimination cases. Currently, he is in law school at Georgetown University Law Center.
Justin Cole, co-author of Chapter 14 on Cost, graduated from from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May of 2018 with majors in Economics and Peace, War, and Defense (PWAD) and a minor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). After college, he worked as a paralegal at Ropes & Gray, a corporate law firm in Boston, Mass. As of Spring 2022, he is a 2L at Yale Law School.
Betsy Neill, co-author of Chapter 12 on Mental Health, graduated from from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May of 2017 with degrees in Political Science and Psychology. She received her Master of Social degree with a clinical concentration at the University of Washington in Seattle. She currently practices as a Child and Family Therapist in a school-based outpatient setting.
Because this book was written with the help of the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professorship and integrates teaching with research at UNC, all of the royalties generated by the book have been directed to the Department of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. Any revenues generated will be used to enhance undergraduate education.
(This page was last updated January 27, 2022.)