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The McCleskey Claim, Again

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

A trial judge in Connecticut has allowed a claim of the type rejected by the Supreme Court in McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) to go forward. This is the perennial claim that statistics show a racial or geographic "bias" in the administration of the death penalty. A long forgotten, but important, fact in the McCleskey case is that the federal district judge, after a full hearing with experts on both sides, found that the study did not prove what its authors claimed it proved. See McCleskey v. Zant, 580 F. Supp. 338 (ND Ga. 1984). In Connecticut, the first study by the Public Defender came up with the "wrong" answer, so they suppressed it. As noted here, the claim that the study had to be suppressed because the results were not statistically significant does not pass the straight-face test...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).