Tinkering with the machinery of death - An analysis of the impact of legislative reform on the sentencing of capital murderers in Texas

In response to the US Supreme Court's holding in Penry v. Lynaugh, the Texas Legislature modified the State's capital sentencing statute. An additional question was added to the special issues framework that was designed explicitly to focus jurors' attention on mitigating circumstances as mandated by the Court. In order to measure the impact of the decision, data were examined from 192 death penalty trials from the two-year periods prior to and after the revisions were implemented. The results of this study indicate that the legislative reform had little influence on the sentencing of capital defendants. The level of future dangerousness posed by defendants remains the primary determinant of decisions made by juries after the legislative reform. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.