Qualifying and Assembling Executioners

Death qualification, the policy and process by which the American legal system determines whether or not jurors are fit to serve on death penalty cases, functions today as an enshrined practice in criminal law after decades of scrutiny under the lens of both the Supreme Court and academic scholars. By tracing the evolution of the death qualification process as well as its impacts and implications on both jury composition and verdicts, this research considers whether death qualification merits continued utilization and protection. While this practice emanates from a value of balancing the interests of the state with that of the accused, its application does little to bear up such a premise. It is clear that death qualification actively threatens the rights of capital defendants and assembles unrepresentative, conviction-prone juries. These findings demand either a significant transformation or immediate termination of the process of death qualification.