Murder and Its Consequences: Essays on Capital Punishment in America

Foreword

ix Foreword Deborah W. Denno I vividly remember the moment I first met Leigh Bienen so many years ago. It seems odd in retrospect to recall the rather low-key impetus for our introduction , given the impact that Leigh would later have on my career. But like many aspects of people’s lives, big things happen when we least expect or even welcome them. So let me tell you my story about Leigh—a tale of law, statistics, and the death penalty, not to mention serendipity and heart. Colleagueships may often be complicated but my tie to Leigh, which spans a quarter-century, is as straightforward as they come. In 1984 I was a senior research associate at the Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania. My mentor , Marvin Wolfgang, was the center’s founding director. At the time, I was heading a massive study of biological and sociological predictors of crime as well as contemplating going to law school. My days were full but, as I would soon find out, they would become fuller still. One afternoon Neil Weiner, a Sellin Center colleague, stopped by my office with what seemed to be a minor request. Would I be willing to attend a meeting with Leigh Bienen, a lawyer from the Office of the Public Defender in Trenton, New Jersey? Leigh was in charge of the Special Projects Unit at the office; she wanted to begin a statistical analysis of all the homicides processed in New Jersey starting in 1982, when New Jersey reenacted the death penalty. Neil had initially agreed to work on the project alone but was already sensing that the task would be a bit more daunting than predicted. He asked me to help him—just for a couple of weeks, he said. With that explanation, I was impressed with Leigh even before I had met her. Clearly, she was not your typical lawyer. Those drawn to the legal profession commonly shun working with the sciences or even with numbers, not to mention the heavily quantitative kinds of modeling that Leigh had in x FOREWORD mind. Leigh was also sufficiently discerning and sophisticated to know that the Sellin Center would be a good place to come for assistance. While many professionals called or relied on our center, surprisingly few were lawyers, despite Marvin Wolfgang’s remarkable ability to bridge both law and criminology . After all, the British Journal of Criminology had pegged Marvin as “the most influential criminologist in the English-speaking world.” No small part of that clout derived from Marvin’s research on the death penalty, which, among other contributions, was used in the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia. Furman had held that the death penalty as applied by states was unconstitutional. I was proud of the Sellin Center’s focus on the death penalty and most particularly Marvin’s critical revelations that the penalty was disproportionately applied to poor African Americans. At the same time, however, it was depressing to contemplate working on a death penalty study. I had avoided researching the area, far preferring to spend my time explaining why people committed crime, not why people were executed. Besides, I wondered, what could realistically be discovered about the death penalty process in New Jersey? Like Marvin, some years earlier other researchers—especially the renowned University of Iowa law school professor David Baldus—had revealed the death penalty’s racially disproportionate application in southern states. Leigh and her colleagues wanted to study the death penalty in a northern state in the 1980s. Surely, I thought, their research would be barren. So when Neil asked me that day to come to the meeting and help out, he and I agreed that the deal would really be for just two weeks—simply to get the data set started and the preliminary steps out of the way. I attended the meeting with Leigh and one of her colleagues, along with Marvin and Neil. Leigh was clearly on top of the discussion, given her knowledge of data management . I would later learn that she had a history of conducting sociological and statistical research as well as a professional connection to Marvin because of it. I could think of no one more uniquely fitted for the New Jersey project than Leigh, both in terms of background knowledge and expertise. And Leigh and her colleague were very dedicated to the enterprise. But my mind was still set on only...