Raymond Paternoster

Raymond Paternoster was an American criminologist who taught at the University of Maryland from 1982 until his death in 2017. Born on 29 February 1952, he studied at the University of Delaware, Southern Illinois University and Florida State University, and began teaching at the University of South Carolina in 1978. He became a full professor at Maryland in 1990. He was best known for research on racial disparities in how the death penalty is applied in the United States, including a study of Maryland capital sentencing commissioned by the state governor and released in 2003. That study reported that black defendants who killed white victims were much more likely to be sentenced to death, and a Maryland Court of Appeals judge later cited it in a dissenting opinion.