We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
On the Liberating Virtues of Irrelevance.
- Authors
Zimring, Franklin E.
- Abstract
The article discusses administration of the death penalty in the United States. The author sets forth a capsule history of the involvement of social and behavioral scientists in the campaign against capital punishment and speculates on how close involvement with litigation might influence the conduct and reporting of research. The article emphasizes on their independence from ongoing constitutional litigation and a few issues on the death penalty. Social science's broad understanding of the death penalty may yet serve the ends of its abolition in the not distant future. Most sociologists and psychologists are opponents of capital punishment, as are the large majority of criminal law scholars. Most of the scholars actively who engage in death penalty research are death penalty opponents, and much of their research is conducted in consultation with lawyers involved in the death penalty challenges thus influencing the research. The litigation of death penalty issues has produced in some states a group of appeals lawyer who are a full-time capital punishment bar. Knowledge about the public reaction to abolition of capital punishment is not the sort of information that litigators seek out. It is instead the kind of broad understanding that is likely to come from the comparative study of criminal justice by social scientists.
- Subjects
UNITED States; CAPITAL punishment; CRIMINAL law; SOCIAL scientists; ACTIONS &; defenses (Law); SOCIAL sciences
- Publication
Law & Society Review, 1993, Vol 27, Issue 1, p9
- ISSN
0023-9216
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/3053745