The authors analyze death penalty charging data for Los Angeles County involving homicides from 1990 to 1994. The data were collected by the Los Angeles Times. This data set is one of the largest tabulations of homicide defendant data yet collected. A Bayesian logistic regression analysis is applied with a proper prior formulated to provide conservative inferences. The authors illustrate procedures for inferences for polytomous predictors and report three analyses with three partially overlapping sets of covariates.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Berk, R. A.
, P. R. Abramson, and P. Okami. 1995. “Sexual Activity as Told in Surveys.” In Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture, edited by P. R. Abramson and S. Pinkerton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2.
Berk, R. A.
, R. E. Weiss, and J. Boger. 1993. “Chance and the Death Penalty.”Law & Society Review27:89-110.
3.
Carlin, B. P.
and T. A. Louis. 1996. Bayes and Empirical Bayes Methods for Data Analysis. New York: Chapman & Hall.
4.
Chamberlain, G.
and E. E. Leamer. 1976. “Matrix Weighted Averages and Posterior Bounds.”Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B38:73-84.
5.
Clarkson, D. B.
and R. I. Jennrich. 1991. “Computing Extended Maximum Likelihood Estimates for Linear Parameter Models.”Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B53:417-426.
6.
Gelman, A.
, J. B. Carlin, H. S. Stern, and D. B. Rubin. 1995. Bayesian Data Analysis. New York: Chapman & Hall.
7.
George, E. I.
and R. E. McCulloch. 1993. “Variable Selection via Gibbs Sampling.”Journal of the American Statistical Association88:881-889.
8.
Gilks, W. R.
, S. Richardson, and D. J. Spiegelhalter. 1996. Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice. New York: Chapman & Hall.
9.
Sorenson, S. B.
and R. A. Berk. 1998. “News Media Portrayals and the Epidemiology of Homicide.”American Journal of Public Health88:1510-1514.
10.
Spiegelhalter, D.
, A. Thomas, N. Best, and W. Gilks. 1996. “Bayesian Inference Using Gibbs Sampling Manual.” Version ii. MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge University. http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/Welcome.html
11.
Weiss, R. E.
, R. A. Berk, and C. Y. Lee. 1996. “Assessing the Capriciousness of Death Penalty Charging.”Law & Society Review30:607-626.
12.
Weiss, R. E.
, M. Cho, and M. Yanuzzi. 1999. “On Bayesian Calculations for Mixture Likelihoods and Priors.”Statistics in Medicine.
13.
Weiss, R. E.
, Y. Wang, and J. G. Ibrahim. 1997. “Predictive Model Selection for Repeated Measures Random Effects Models Using Bayes Factors.”Biometrics53:159-169.
