New York – The pursuit of a United States standard for determining the worst of crimes became reality with the publication of three articles on the Depravity Standard in this month's issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice.
For twenty years, Dr. Michael Welner has been spearheading research aiming at terms in criminal law statutes such as “heinous,” “depraved,” “inhuman,” “vile,” and “evil” that currently distinguish crimes deserving of greater punishment. Without consistency and clarity in definition, courts have long wrestled with the fair assessment of the worst-of-the-worst crimes.
Inspired by casework experience, which illustrates to all forensic scientists that some crimes are truly more severe than others in their class, Dr. Welner set out to determine what it is that makes one murder “heinous” or more depraved than other murders. The Journal of Criminal Justice articles detail the inspiration and development of the Depravity Standard as a valid, reliable instrument to assist judges, jurors, corrections officials, lawmakers, and the academic community in this challenging responsibility.
The first of the articles (The Depravity Standard I: An introduction) demonstrates how and why criminal sentencing is biased in the absence of a Depravity Standard, the Supreme Court’s efforts to discipline the designation of crimes as “heinous,” and how the Supreme Court’s vision influenced the development of a Depravity Standard that:
- Distinguishes the worst of different crimes
- Incorporates the gamut of values and diverse backgrounds of the public
- Incorporates evidence of intent, actions, victim choice, and perpetrator attitude to inform the dimensions of a crime under study
- Defines these elements of intent, actions, victim choice, and attitude in precise detail, in order to apply to the diversity and breadth of crime
- Is blind to race, gender, ethnic background, criminal and medical history, religion, political affiliation, and other personal demographics that can bias investigation and analysis
- Is applicable to case assessment and mining evidence through a reliable methodology
- Is easily applicable to existing court procedures and customary practices, and across states
- Informs courts, corrections, and lawmakers in a manner that’s neither pro-prosecution nor pro-defense
The second article (The Depravity Standard II: Developing a measure of the worst of crimes) details how the Depravity Standard research set out to accomplish these and other goals through the integration of thematic analysis of over 100 higher court decisions, public surveys of more than 25,000 U.S participants, and data mining 770 murder case files. These steps and more were utilized to establish twenty-five items of intent, actions, victim choice, and attitudes, to carefully fine tune definitions of these items, and to develop qualifying and disqualifying examples for each item.
The Depravity Standard III: Validating an evidence-based guide is the third article of the series, and details how content validity was established through the study of 730 adjudicated guilty murder case files from a diverse and geographically broad array of United States jurisdictions. The article also describes interrater reliability studies that demonstrate high agreement between raters for the presence of the Depravity Standard’s twenty-five items across 250 murder cases. In addition, the article presents data from public surveys that compare each of the twenty-five items as they would present in a murder to develop weights for each of the items. Finally, the article provides a scoring system for case application, based on case data and participant surveys.
The research studies, which continue to explore new applications of the Depravity Standard to the criminal justice system, involve a massive effort coordinated by Dr. Welner and, in recent years, The Forensic Panel’s Research Director, Kate O’Malley. Ms. O’Malley noted, “It is an enormous task, and a privilege to take on a challenge as meaningful and far reaching as ‘what is a depraved crime?’ This research effort was unafraid to embrace critical input with the necessary introspection that goes along with research methodology and design. Everyone on our team was dedicated and had to be to arrive at this achievement,” she noted.
Jurisdictions that contributed their murder case files included Little Rock AR, Lake County and St. Clair County IL, Clay, Lowndes, and Oktibbeha County MS, Kauai HI, Utica NY, Jacksonville FL, Jefferson Parish LA, and Jackson County MO. “We are grateful for the trust of those jurisdictions, and their taking ownership of a role in upgrading the justice system by making it possible for us to collect such a huge amount of data to inform the development and validation studies,” noted Dr. Welner. “We also want to thank the many thousands of Americans who take part in the ongoing surveys at www.depravitystandard.org. Your input on how you weigh depravity in crime helps us to further refine this guide to best inform courtroom and corrections decision-making. When the American public is engaged in developing its own standard, justice is representative of the public, as it should be.”
“This is a watershed moment in crime classification,” observed Dr. Welner. “In this age of critical expectations of evidence, and whether there is sufficient evidence, judges and juries deserve to be informed by the fine points that distinguish one crime from another. The Depravity Standard is a tool by which each crime can be scrutinized under much higher magnification. Its focus on the components of a crime eliminates sources of bias in sentencing. In so doing, the Depravity Standard does more than inform us about the worst-of-the-worst crimes. It sets a bar for fairness in criminal sentencing and our system of early prison release that illustrates how thorough investigation and precise forensic science bring out the best in justice. We look forward to publishing more of the many findings of this landmark research.”
Access the articles here:
The Depravity Standard I: An introduction
The Depravity Standard II: Developing a measure of the worst of crimes
The Depravity Standard III: Validating an evidence-based guide
For more information on The Depravity Standard, click here
