Deborah Beim and Co-author Examine Death Penalty Appeals

Deborah Beim, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale and ISPS Resident Faculty Fellow, and John Kastellec, Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton, co-authored a piece for the London School of Economics blogsite dedicated to American politics, LSEUSApp.

“Judges differ substantially in their likelihood of granting relief from a death sentence, but several features of the federal judicial hierarchy increase legal consistency” examines over 1,400 death penalty decisions made by three-judge panels over the last thirty years. The authors look at not only the pattern of difference between the Democratic and Republican judges’ decisions, but the effect of random assignment to these cases. 

The article is based on the paper “The Interplay of Ideological Diversity, Dissents, and Discretionary Review in the Judicial Hierarchy: Evidence from Death Penalty Cases”, forthcoming in the Journal of Politics.