Americans rely on state supreme court justices to deliver impartial rulings, as they represent the court of last resort for most cases before them. But state retention mechanisms may threaten the judicial independence necessary for state high courts to rule impartially. Current research provides evidence of state methods of judicial retention impacting judicial decision-making. This thesis examines how much influence these systems exert on justices by comparing justices’ decision-making before and after entering their final term, as mandated by judicial age limits. With a dataset of nearly 15,000 votes delivered between 1995 and 2010 in death penalty cases, I use logistic regression models to examine if being in the terminal term has a statistically significant impact on a justice’s likelihood to vote against the administration of the deathpenalty. I find that being in the terminal term lowers the odds that a justice votes for the death penalty to a statistically significant degree.
Owen Fender (Fri,) studied this question.