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Law and Statistics in Conflict: Reflections on McCleskey v. Kemp

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Handbook of Psychology and Law

Abstract

Warren McCleskey is a black man who was sentenced to death in 1978 for the murder of a white police officer in Atlanta, Georgia. He challenged the constitutionality of his sentence on the grounds that Georgia administered its death-sentencing laws during the period 1973 to 1979 in a racially discriminatory manner. McCleskey’s lawyers based this claim on two quantitative studies of Georgia’s death-sentencing system that we conducted in the early 1980s. In McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), the U.S. Supreme Court rejected these claims by a 5 to 4 vote.

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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Baldus, D.C., Woodworth, G., Pulaski, C.A. (1992). Law and Statistics in Conflict: Reflections on McCleskey v. Kemp . In: Kagehiro, D.K., Laufer, W.S. (eds) Handbook of Psychology and Law. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4038-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4038-7_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-4040-0

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