Is killing one’s partner during a dispute, or murdering a stranger on the street worse? What about stealing from a dying woman, or embezzling from a corporation? Disseminating thousands of child pornography images, or coercing one child into filming? New research from the developers of the Depravity Standard was unveiled this week to enable the determination of the precise degree of depravity of any criminal case.
Terms like ‘depraved,’ ‘heinous,’ atrocious’ and ‘cruel’ have been used ambiguously to impact sentences of the worst-of-the-worst crimes, and to tease apart otherwise similarly charged offences. In Gregg v Georgia, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it necessary that any aggravating factors used in capital sentencing be grounded in, and a reflection of, “societal standards.”
Decades later, Dr. Michael Welner, forensic psychiatrist and Chairman of The Forensic Panel, set out to standardize these terms for what denotes an evil crime. The Depravity Standard included surveys to the general public about qualities of criminal intent, actions, attitudes and victimology. After over 13 years of research spanning several development and validation phases, early results from two completed public surveys involving over 30,000 participants have demonstrated consensus support for including the 25 items in a Depravity Standard for use by courts and corrections officials. Moreover, the public surveys have given researchers insight into how the general public compares and ranks each item for how evil it is, whether it is “disrespect for the victim after the fact,” “carrying out a crime to show off” or “criminal indulgence.”
Indeed the Depravity Standard research has demonstrated the unthinkable – that as inscrutable an idea as evil is, consensus can be achieved about those qualities of a crime that broad agreement across demographics supports as distinctive of criminal evil. Preliminary analyses of early phases of the research found an overwhelming societal consensus. Each of the 25 items garnered a minimum of 69.7% to 99.2% support from participants for being somewhat if not especially depraved. Furthermore, the research has demonstrated that there are qualities of crimes that, even among the worst, the public feels are more strongly representative of evil.
The Depravity Standard has also attracted considerable interest from policy-makers concerned about the arbitrary approaches to decisions on early release from prison. Support for the Depravity Standard has come from states where prison overcrowding is forcing the hand of corrections officials – despite no means of guaranteeing that leniency is reserved fairly for those offenders who committed comparably less serious offenses. Numerous jurisdictions have supplied large numbers of adjudicated cases to the Depravity Standard project to validate our instrument against a variety of cases.
“Our findings have inspired us now to not only clarify the ranking of different elements of depravity, but also how to weigh a particular crime relative to another, based on evidence unique to that crime’s intent, actions, victim choice, and the perpetrators attitude about what he or she did,” notes Dr. Welner.
Dr. Welner and Kate O’Malley, Director of Research for The Forensic Panel, unveiled a final research survey today enabling the public to refine the scoring of the Depravity Standard for application to homicides and murder, assaults, sex crimes, and felonies that do not involve violence against persons, such as white collar crimes. “The elements of each category of crime must be surveyed independently, in order to compare crimes within their crime class. This final phase investigates item weighting, but most importantly compares rapes to other sex crimes, arsons to other arsons and crimes that do not cause physical injury, and murder to murder and other homicides,” explained O’Malley.
We now know what makes a crime depraved, but can we determine how depraved each crime is by calibrating weights to each item of The Depravity Standard? To answer this research question, a broad sampling of the American and International community is now taking place. Dr. Welner and his research team appeal to the general public to participate in this latest phase of the Depravity Standard research at www.depravitystandard.org. This is a historic opportunity for the general public to have a direct hand in shaping future sentencing decision. Like a vote, each voice counts toward defining our societal standard.
Please forward news of this exciting final stage of the survey at www.depravitystandard.org to friends, family, coworkers, students, and others who would be interested. You are actively taking part in shaping the future of our justice system. You may one day be families of victims or of defendants, or even jurors facing these difficult decisions on depravity and in need of guidance of societal standards. We can only achieve a just, fair, race, gender, and socio-demographic blind measure of the worst-of-the-worst crimes if each of us participates. It’s up to all of us to make our voices count.
Please pass this on to others. We encourage and greatly appreciate the participation of all.
