A hard look at the death penalty

By John Finn

If Latecia Wiles has her way, capital punishment will one day be outlawed in this country and throughout the world. For as long as she can remember, Wiles has opposed the death penalty. Her I.S. project, "...and Justice for All? A quantitative Analysis of Support of Capital Punishment and a Philosophical Examination of Theories Behind Support," reinforced her position and set the stage for what may become a lifelong campaign against execution.

Inspired by the book Dead Man Walking (by Tim Robbins), Wiles began to pay more attention to the subject of capital punishment as she worked her way through college. A native of the Wooster area, she served first as a secretary at the Wayne County Adult Probation Department and later as an aide with two law firms.

"I began to come into contact with convicted felons as the probation department, and I realized that the stenotypes and popular conceptions of what these people are like are often based on mistaken ideas," Wiles says.

As a double major in anthropology and philosophy, Wiles crafted a project that would investigate three aspects of capital punishment from the perspective of both disciplines.

"Latecia did a very goo job of maintaining her objectivity while illustrating how two different disciplines can approach the same topic," says her co-adviser, Henry Kruezman (philosophy). "I believe her efforts will serve as a model for how students can do interdisciplinary work in I.S. projects."

Wiles's first goal was to determine the basic levels of support for the death penalty from the viewpoint of law enforcement officials and of convicted felons. Then she tried to determine how much knowledge each group had about the death penalty and whether or not such knowledge influences support for capital punishment. Finally, she sought to explore the different theories of support to determine whether they are more retributive (justified because the offense committed deserves an equivalent form of retaliation) or utilitarian (appropriate because it produces more good than harm).

Wiles's workplace connections helped her reach both populations. She gave law enforcement officials an anonymous questionnaire that featured true-or-false questions as well as a scale that measured the extent to which respondents agreed or disagreed with a particular statement.

Surveying the convicted felons was a bit more complicated. "Many of these people were illiterate," she says. "I had to read the survey to most of them and in many cases explain what certain words meant."

The law enforcement officials expressed overwhelming support for capital punishment (93.7 percent), while less than half of the convicted felons (46.4 percent) favored it.

"The most interesting part of Latecia's project that it was done on such a large scale with more than two hundred surveys administered," says Anne Nurse (anthropology and sociology), who also advised Whiles.

"Both groups scored poorly in their knowledge about capital punishment," says Wiles. "For example, most people think it cost more to sentence people to life in prison than to execute them. That is simply not true in part because of the appeals process."

"Support for capital punishment, whether retributive or utilitarian, just doesn't make sense," she argues. Her I.S. work helped convince Wiles to follow her convictions. She plans to attend law school, where she can study public-interest issues.