Death penalty charging in Los Angeles County - An illustrative data analysis using skeptical priors

The authors analyze death penalty charging data for Los Angeles County invo lving homicides from 1990 to 1994. The data were collected by the Los Angel es Times. This data set is one of the largest tabulations of homicide defen dant data yet collected. A Bayesian logistic regression analysis is applied with a proper prior formulated to provide conservative inferences. The aut hors illustrate procedures for inferences for polytomous predictors and rep ort three analyses with three partially overlapping sets of covariates.