Adverse Childhood Experiences and Their Role As Mitigators for Youthful and Non-Youthful Offenders in Capital Sentencing Cases

Background and Purpose:

Capital punishment; the death penalty, is a controversial punishment.  As an abundance of research suggests, the death penalty is disproportionality applied to those in minority groups, with mental challenges, low-income, men, and in certain regions (Acker, Bohm, & Lanier, 2003). Another area of concerns is when the death penalty is applied to youthful offenders. Youthful offenders are those offenders closer in age to juveniles, and it can be argued that they may be more susceptible to the same factors that the Supreme Court cite as making the death penalty disproportionate for minors (Roper v. Simmons, 2005). 

The bifurcated trial system of a capital case allows for the jury to consider aggravating and mitigating circumstances experienced by the defendant prior to making their decision for life in prison or a death sentence. Many of these factors are now recognized as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The information yielded from the Felitti and colleagues (1998) study was pertinent and timely with regards to juvenile justice. Recent studies have indicated that ACEs may increase the odds of involvement in the criminal justice system and youth with higher ACE scores are more likely to offend and re-offend than youth with lower ACE scores (Baglivio & Jackowski, 2013).

Methods:

This study looked to contribute to the extant literature regarding ACEs and mitigation by addressing these questions: (1) do ACE variables mitigate against a death sentence, and (2) does the effect of ACE mitigators on capital sentencing outcomes vary by youthful versus non-youthful offender status. For the purposes of this study, it is argued that the youthful offender is any offender who is under the age of 25.  To address those questions bivariate and multivariate analyses were employed. Logistic regression was used to model the effects of youthful offender status and ACE mitigators while controlling for a host of offense, offender, and victim characteristics associated with capital sentencing decisions.  The North Carolina Capital Sentencing Project (NCCSP) provided the data for this study with a sample of 390 youthful offenders and 447 non-youthful offenders from 1990-2009.

Results:

Evidence from correlations tables suggest that that adverse childhood experiences mitigate more for youthful offenders than adult offenders. For youthful offenders, broken home, absent father, drug and alcohol abuse, physical abuse, witnessing parental misconduct, and mental illness attained statistical significance, and all showed a weak to moderate positive relationship when rejected.  In other words, a death sentence was more likely when these mitigators were presented to the jury but rejected.  Conversely, accepted mitigators were correlated with a negative relationship, meaning a sentence of death was less likely. However, logistic regression models indicate that ACE mitigators for both groups showed a decrease in the likelihood of a death sentence.

Conclusions and Implications:

Social workers often serve as mitigation specialists in capital murder cases, employed to prepare an in-depth bio-psycho-social history of the accused (Andrews, 1991, 2012, Schroeder, Guin, Pogue, & Bordelon, 2006). Knowing how mitigators, particularly how ACE mitigators are considered by a jury, can help promote social justice by sparing a life.