Life Terms or Death Sentences: The Uneasy Relationship between Judicial Elections and Capital Punishment

Abstract

One day Louise Harris approached her lover, Lorenzo "Bo Bo" McCarter, with a proposition that led to an agreement to kill her husband.' Harris and McCarter paid Michael Sockwell and Alex Hood one hundred dollars to carry out the gruesome killing.2 Following the killing, Harris, McCarter, Sockwell, and Hood were all convicted of capital murder in separate proceedings. In each case, a jury recommended life in prison without parole. Yet, in two of the four cases, the trial judge declined to follow the jury recommendations, choosing instead to sentence the defendants to death by electrocution. Different sentences following guilty verdicts on the same offense often occur because the "guilty/not-guilty" determination affords only the crudest approximation of culpability. Through sentencing, however, mitigating and aggravating considerations can give countenance to culpability. Still, the juries in the Harris murder cases had access to these considerations when they reached the same sentence recom-