Book: The Decline 
  of the Death Penalty 
  and the Discovery 
  of Innocence


  Mass Comm Article:
  "Media Framing of    
  Capital Punishment    
  and Its Impact on 
  Individuals' 
  Cognitive Responses"


  Forthcoming Chapter
  in Schaffner and  
  Sellers (eds), Winning 
  with Words, 
  New York: Routledge


  Additional 
  Documents
   
   
 

 

Framing the Death Penalty

This project traces the changing politics and issue-definitions of the capital punishment debate in the United States, shedding new light on framing as a political mechanism and demonstrating the significant effects of framing on individual attitudes, mass public opinion, and public policy itself.

Frank Baumgartner and Suzanna Linn and I began this project in 2003, collecting the abstracts of all New York Times articles written on capital punishment since 1960 and coding each abstract according to an exhaustive set of arguments that could be made in the death penalty debate. This data set illustrates the shifting nature of the death penalty debate over the last half century, documenting the rise and fall of each major frame: from "eye for an eye" to "cruel and unusual punishment" to the "innocence frame" of the late 1990s and today. This last frame, innocence, rests simply on the recognition that the American criminal justice system, dealing as it does with thousands of criminal cases and run as it is by bureaucrats, is not immune from mistakes. We argue that the innocence frame is unique among all the frames employed in the modern death penalty in that it poses no direct challenge to the "eye for an eye" sentiment -- still held by the vast majority of Americans -- that death is appropriate retribution for heinous crimes. Rather, this frame focuses public attention on the practical improbability of 100% accuracy in the system.

In our article "Media Framing of Capital Punishment and Its Impact on Individuals' Cognitive Responses," coauthored with Penn State Communication Professors Frank Dardis and Fuyuan Shen, we show how the innocence frame is more effective than alternative frames at changing people's opinions on the death penalty because it displaces the line of conflict in the debate in a way that runs orthogonal to previous moral- and constitutional-based frames. The main finding from this work, that "not all frames are equal," holds important implications for broader framing research.

In our book The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence, we explore the evolution of the innocence frame from the obscurity of academia in the 1980s to the development of student-based legal aid clinics called "innocence projects" in the 1990s, to the explosion of national attention to problems of wrongful conviction that we have documented through our media analysis. Most importantly, we examine the influence of media framing over time on aggregate public opinion and public policy. As noted above, the innocence frame invites Americans to reconsider their stance on the death penalty while still retaining their core values on the issue, and many Americans have. According to Gallup, public support for the death penalty has declined ten percentage points in the last decade -- a significant drop in public opinion marginals by any standard. And as public concern about the death penalty has grown, the system itself has changed; the average number of death sentences per year since 2000 (150) is just over half the yearly average during the previous decade (228), and sentences continue to drop each year. Through time series analysis, we show that framing has a strong and significant influence both on public sentiment and on the actual number of people sentenced to death.

  
 
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