Book Review: Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty by Baumgartner, F. R., Davidson, M., Johnson, K. R., Krishnamurthy, A., & Wilson, C. P.

• Author: Brandon C. Dulisse
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403418787226
• Subject Matter: Book Review

https://doi.org/10.1177/0887403418787226

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2019, Vol. 30(5) 811 –813

© The Author(s) 2018

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Book Review

Book Review

Baumgartner, F. R., Davidson, M., Johnson, K. R., Krishnamurthy, A., & Wilson, C. P. (2018).

Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

396 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-084154-6

Reviewed by: Brandon C. Dulisse, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0887403418787226

The legality (and morality) surrounding the use of the death penalty in the United

States has remained a divisive topic for legislators and the public alike. This incongru-

ence in part stems from the divergent opinions of the Supreme Court in the landmark

cases of Furman v. Georgia (1972) and Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Furman was a con-

troversial 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court striking down all current death penalty

actions and requiring states to remove arbitrary and discriminatory effects of the pun-

ishment to satisfy the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In the less

than 4 years after, many states quickly passed new death penalty statutes that they

argued satisfied the requirements left in the Court’s decision on Furman. This led to

Gregg v. Georgia (1976), along with other similar state cases, which ultimately rees-

tablished the use of the death penalty under these new “modern” guidelines.

Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty begins its investigation

here (post-Gregg), examining patterns and empirical evidence in this “modern” period

to conclude whether or not current death penalty laws are living up to the federal

parameters set up in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) and beyond. This volume consists of 13

cogent and concise chapters ranging from explanations of previous case law, to

detailed and descriptive patterns of death penalty usage from all 50 states for the last

four decades. In the authors’ inquiry on this topic, detailed patterns from public data

sources provide ample evidence that a new evaluation is necessary to reconsider the

constitutionality of death penalty statutes across the United States.

From the beginning of Chapter 1, the authors caution that the intent of this work is

not necessarily to answer a question of “who deserves death” or even to create a liter-

ary narrative to invalidate death penalty statutes. Rather, the authors resonate with the

well-known dissenting opinion of Justice Thurgood Marshall in Furman v. Georgia

(1972) who famously suggested that the more the general public understood about the

death penalty and its application, the less appealing it would become as a punishment.

787226CJPXXX10.1177/0887403418787226Criminal Justice Policy ReviewBook Review

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