Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the United States, when an offender on death row is about to be executed, family members of the victim(s) (i.e. co-victims) are permitted to witness the execution. A common justification for this practice is that it provides closure for the victims’ families (the ‘closure argument’); however, there is little empirical research to either refute or support this claim. This study examined the statements that co-victims who had attended an execution made to the press immediately following the execution, in order to learn more about their feelings about closure. The relationship between aspects of the crime, the offender’s last words, and the co-victim’s statements was also examined. Generally, results indicated that victims’ family members expressed their views on closure in various ways, and that the 23 percent who did mention closure were evenly divided on whether they felt the execution provided closure or not. Co-victims were more likely to mention some type of closure when they felt that justice had been served, and when the offender asked for forgiveness and stated a hope that the execution would bring the co-victim closure. Overall, qualitative and quantitative results did not support the closure argument.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".