Is there a connection between forms of social organization and the propensity to use capital punishment? Probably no other current legal sanction in any advanced society is as harsh, but there is little research on the conditions that influence executions. In part because public officials decide the criminal codes, sentences, and appeals, many theorists view punishment as an intrinsically political phenomenon. The many studies of the individual attributes that lead to death sentences have been extremely useful, but the influence of political conditions and the social divisions that influence these legal proceedings should be given more attention. For example, the state and federal appeals process has been largely ignored, but these procedures clearly are the most important explanation for execution rates. Almost entirely due to successful appeals only less than 10% of all state offenders given a death sentence ultimately are executed. Because so few capital offenders are punished in this manner and because these offenders spend such diverse amounts of time on death row, we propose to use survival analysis to assess the contextual and individual determinants that shape execution probabilities. Those states in which the death penalty is legal differ sharply in their willingness to use this extreme sanction. In many states that are reluctant to execute, as death sentences accumulate and the number of prisoners given this sentence grows, the amount of time these prisoners spend on death row becomes longer and longer, but other states execute far more quickly. This study proposes to analyze death row inmate survival rates in the US from 1973 to 2000 to detect the social conditions and the individual offender characteristics that jointly affect differences in execution probabilities over time and across the U.S. states. Such a research design is particularly appropriate for at least two reasons. First, this process is best modeled with survival techniques due to the long delay in the legal procedures that lead to an execution and due to the small minority of death row offenders who ultimately are executed. Second, one can combine aggregate time-varying covariates that measure the social and political environment with the characteristics of individual offenders in survival models to find out how these factors affect the timing and the probability of executions. It follows that analyses conducted with event history procedures that gauge both the individual and environmental determinants that should alter execution probabilities ought to add to our theoretical knowledge about the use of this lethal punishment. For example, this approach can be used to see if minority death row offenders are more or less likely to be executed or if states with larger minority populations are more likely to use this penalty. With these procedures we can see if minority capital offenders have a worse hazard rate due to the appeals process in comparatively conservative jurisdictions. The broader impacts of this study include the following. The research will be of interest to scholars and policymakers interested in understanding the factors that lead to inequalities associated with executions of US prisoners. The research we propose can throw light on some critical theoretical issues about the death penalty at a time when this severe and irreversible punishment is again starting to be questioned by the US public and policymakers.
