When the state Supreme Court recently threw out the death penalty, the justices’ opinions naturally focused on weighty constitutional questions, about equal rights and the proportionality of punishment in our criminal-justice system.
But most of the yearslong case that led to the landmark ruling was consumed by a far less lofty question: Is Katherine Beckett legit?
“I had no idea that my work, or questions about my competence, would become so central to a constitutional death-penalty case,” Beckett told me. “So to have it come out the way it did … it was exhausting and suspenseful, but in the end, extremely gratifying.”
Beckett is the University of Washington sociology professor whose 2014 study of capital-murder cases in our state found that black defendants were four times as likely to be sentenced to death as defendants of other races. It’s no exaggeration to say this single finding killed the death penalty.
“To reach our conclusion, we afford great weight to Beckett’s analysis and conclusions,” was how Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst put it in the court’s unanimous ruling.
But it’s also no exaggeration to say that Beckett, a UW prof for 18 years, was put on trial every bit as much as the death penalty itself.
She and her co-author, Heather Evans, who was then a grad student but is now a UW sociology lecturer, were blasted as unethical by a state-hired expert. He accused them of “opportunistically” jiggering the models to reach a predetermined result. The state’s attorneys derisively dubbed their work “garbage in, garbage out.”
Little known to the public, a behind-the-scenes scientific smackdown consumed the case for more than two years. It all revolved around one study, based on trial reports filled out by the judges in aggravated-murder cases. It looked at all 297 aggravated-murder cases from 1981 to 2014 in our state in which the defendants were both adults and eligible for the death penalty.
The second sentence of the study is shocking in its own right, and maybe helps explain why folks got so riled up: “To date, however, no published study has examined the role of race in capital sentencing in Washington state, where the death penalty was first authorized 160 years ago.”
We’ve never even looked at the issue before? We’re putting people to death and we didn’t even want to know.
The findings of the study are fascinating. For starters, prosecutors over the 33-year period showed no racial bias when deciding whether to seek the death penalty. But juries were not so equitable. At sentencing, which in capital cases also goes to the jury, black defendants were four times as likely to get death.
“It really implicates the juries,” Beckett said of her study. She said it could be explicit racial bias or implicit, subconscious bias — it’s impossible to know for sure.
It turns out science is still legit. That’s as good news as I’ve reported in this space in quite some time.
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