Class #17: An Error Free Death Penalty?

Background Reading

• Utts, Chapter 12: "Relationships Between Categorical Variables"

News Links

• " Sentence Revision: States Seek Ways to Make Executions Error Free." By Laura Mansnerus, New York Times, November 2, 2003.

• A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995, the study by Joseph Liebman cited in the New York Times

• " Murder One," The Economist, June 15, 2000. This article about the Liebman study summarized the findings with the following double y-axis plot.

  

  The article says:

  " 85% of the states which have the death penalty make serious mistakes in 60% or more of the cases... If there is any state that looks unusually bad it is Virginia: for its size it executes five times as many people as other states are reverses only a quarter the number of cases (see chart)."

  Which of these figures can you actually read from the chart?