The addition of such a scaled variable to our existing tools would carry the potential of linking previously unrelated research and perhaps coming forward with newly convincing evidence demonstrating the hypothesized relationship between the attitudes of jurors and firmly institutionalized procedures for death qualification. If it could be shown that death qualification heightened or made more likely the selection of racially biased capital juries, that would be significant. Some objections of my objections are minor, some are not. Professor Russell operationalizes a variable based upon the percentage of blacks in a county on the following theory. The larger the black population density in the county, the larger the relative probability of a white resident having regular interracial contact.
Whites tend to be more supportive of the death penalty.
I would not hypothesize, however, that the relationship would be as is proposed here. The nature of the county may be relevant. Metropolitan Atlanta, for example, is composed of 15 counties. The demographic patterns in those counties must be interrelated and the variable per cent black must not be everywhere indicative of the same phenomenon. Consider Los Angeles.