CHANCE AND THE DEATH-PENALTY

We address capriciousness in decisions by prosecutors to charge homici de defendants with a capital crime. We suggest that it is useful to th ink of such decisions as a kind of lottery in which one should focus o n the distribution of outcomes when considering both the nature of cap riciousness and the degree of capriciousness. After our conceptional f ramework is introduced, we illustrate our ideas with the analysis of a data set from San Francisco.