Sociology Ph. D. student Julia Thomas was awarded the 2022 Distinguished Student Paper Award within the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section, which is presented annually by ASA for the best paper authored by a graduate student. Thomas’ paper “The Legacy of Lynching: Historic Lynching Practices and Individuals’ Risk of Being Sentenced to Death” is described in the award announcement below:
Though scholars have long argued that the contemporary criminal-legal system is rooted in legacies of racial violence, data limitations have rendered the precise relationship unclear. In “The Legacy of Lynching,” Julia Thomas uses an original, georeferenced, case-level dataset to tie the legacy of lynching in Texas to the contemporary use of capital punishment. She finds direct effects on Black defendants, especially those with white victims, adeptly highlighting the relationship between contemporary death sentences and historic reliance on lynching as a tool of racial control. The committee was unanimous that Thomas’ paper is the kind of much-needed empirically and theoretically grounded work tracing the racialized and historical roots of contemporary punishment practices today.
Congratulations, Julia!