Capital Jury Project

The Capital Jury Project (CJP) is a consortium of university-based research studies on the decision-making of jurors in death penalty cases in the United States. It was founded in 1991 and is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goal of the CJP is to determine whether jurors' sentencing decisions conform to the constitution and do not reflect the arbitrary decisions the United States Supreme Court found when it ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia.^[1] That 1972 Supreme Court decision eliminated the death penalty, which was not reinstated until Gregg v. Georgia in 1976.^[2]

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that statistics showed that blacks in Georgia were more likely to be sentenced to death than whites, but concluded that the evidence of specific racial discrimination in McCleskey's case was lacking so McCleskey's death sentence was not unconstitutional.^[3] However, this decision raised the issue of whether the problem of arbitrary or racist death penalties has been resolved.^[2]