How Statistics Doomed Washington State’s Death Penalty
A half-century after Justice Lewis Powell applied the logic of tobacco manufacturers to dismiss empirical studies, a state supreme court decided to accept their findings.
Last week, the American death penalty lurched on step closer to its eventual demise, as the Washington Supreme Court decided to fan away some of the smoke from Lewis Powell’s cigarette.
In State v. Gregory, the state court held that the death penalty, as imposed in the state of Washington, was unconstitutional because it was racially biased.
How does that relate to Powell and tobacco? Fastidious and health conscious (acquaintances remember seeing him order a turkey sandwich for lunch, then set aside the bread and eat only the turkey), Powell was a non-smoker. But he also sat from 1963 until 1970 on the board of Virginia-based tobacco giant Philip Morris. Like all members of the board, he
