Whether or not defendants get death penalty is based on LOOKS, study suggests
- Researchers had 1,400 participants look at police photos of 400 prisoners
- Participants sentenced to death those with downturned lips and heavy eyebrows
- READ MORE: How the death penalty has evolved over the past 250 years
Jurors take an oath to deliver verdicts without bias or prejudice, but a new study suggests the promise is broken when the death penalty is on the table.
Researchers at Columbia University revealed Thursday that the shape of suspects' facial features affects whether they are sentenced to death or given life in prison.
Hundreds of photos of Florida prisoners convicted of murder were shown to a mock jury in the experiment.
Certain facial features – such as downturned lips and heavy eyebrows – were judged to be more unreliable and more likely to result in the death penalty.
Hundreds of photos of Florida prisoners convicted of murder were shown to a mock jury in the experiment. Certain facial features – such as downturned lips and heavy eyebrows – were rated as more unreliable and more likely to be sentenced to death
“These findings support previous research that facial stereotypes can have disastrous consequences in the real world, but, more importantly, provide a potential step in the fight against these types of biases,” lead author Jon Freeman said in a press release.
'By uncovering a cognitive pathway toward eradicating facial stereotypes, future research should investigate whether this training can be broadly applied and how to ensure that prejudice reduction is sustained over time.'
Researchers asked 1,400 volunteer participants to rate the photos of 400 white male inmates convicted of murder — 200 were sentenced to life in prison and 200 were sentenced to death.
Participants were then asked to assign target words to each photo: reliability, that is, caring, friendly, pleasant, trustworthy, warm, and unreliable, referring to cold, cruel, mean, unpleasant, and unreliable.
Researchers asked 1,400 volunteer participants to review the mugshots of 400 white male inmates convicted of murder – 200 were sentenced to life in prison and 200 were sentenced to death
The team found that 95 percent of death row inmates were considered “untrustworthy” based solely on their appearance, many of which had heavy eyebrows and downturned lips.
These results were conducted before the participants received any training about facial bias, suggesting that this should be part of the jury process.
This new intervention process increased people's awareness of facial biases, successfully eliminating them and removing their unconscious responses.
“This is important because unconscious responses can still wreak havoc on people's behavior even when conscious decisions appear unbiased,” the release said.
“If there are consequential judgments that are biased by facial stereotypes, our findings suggest that these have the potential to be flexibly remapped and dismantled,” the study said, according to the press release.
Researchers said they are conducting other studies to test the intervention process with racially and gender diverse faces.
The annual number of death sentences has fallen by more than 80 percent over the past two decades, falling to a near-record low in 2015 after peaking at more than 300 death penalty sentences per year in the mid-1990s.
Last year, 11 executions took place in the US and 20 people were sentenced, compared to 18 sentenced to death in 2021, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
The DPIC reported that there are 2,331 people on death row as of January 2023, with California registering the most death row inmates at 665 and Florida coming in second with 313 inmates on death row.
The Pew Research Center reported that as of 2019, 98 percent of people on death row were men, with black inmates making up 41 percent of death row inmates and white inmates making up 56 percent of death row inmates.