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In recent decades, the use of capital punishment has declined, but in its place, a ‘new death penalty’ has arisen: life without parole (LWOP), which is being used far more frequently and for more crimes than capital punishment ever was. Yet, LWOP has received far less scholarly attention than the death penalty. Because of its greater scale, assessing the effects of LWOP on crime has important policy implications and is a better test of extreme penalties. Existing studies of LWOP focus on humanitarian issues and ignore its potentially reciprocal relationship with crime. Therefore, we use available LWOP data to fill these gaps in the literature, using models specifically designed to control for potential reciprocal effects. The results indicate there is no reciprocal causation between LWOP and violent crime and, at best, LWOP’s impact on crime is small, temporary, and, most importantly, no greater than the impact of life with parole.

The very contextual nature of most mitigating evidence runs counter to America’s individualistic culture. Prior research has found that capital jurors are unreceptive to most mitigating circumstances, but no research has examined the capital sentencing decisions of trial judges. This study fills that gap through a content analysis of eight judicial sentencing opinions from Delaware. The findings indicate that judges typically dismiss contextualizing evidence in their sentencing opinions and instead focus predominately on the defendant’s culpability. This finding calls into question the ability of guided discretion statutes to ensure the consideration of mitigation and limit arbitrariness in the death penalty.