A Statistical Evaluation of the United States’ Death Penalty System Through the Lens of Equal Protection Under the Law

The constitutionality of the death penalty has been called into question numerous times. Most commonly, scholars look to the Eighth and Fourteen Amendments when examining the legality of this practice. The Eighth Amendment states that cruel and unusual punishment shall not be inflicted and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law. This thesis will explore the usage of the death penalty in several states through the lens of the Fourteenth Amendment to see whether these states are in compliance with the Constitution’s guarantee that all citizens will receive equal protection under their law, and in this case, under the states’ death penalty statutes through three areas where potential disparity in sentencing patterns may arise: changing usage over time, different rates of usage for counties within a state, and sentencing patterns based on the race and gender of the offender and victim. We examined whether these disparities arise first when we sum all of the death sentences in the nation as a whole and then we examined whether these patterns were consistent for the individual states of Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, and Indiana. Ultimately, it was found that significant sentencing disparities exist in a similar pattern across all five states analyzed and the nation as a whole, thus demonstrating that the modern American death penalty system is not being carried out in conformance with the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.Bachelor of Art