Here’s something I stumbled across while reading up on the subject…
In McCleskey v. Kemp, in 1987, despite a study that found that the black murderer of a white victim was 4.3 times as likely to be executed as any other perpetrator-victim racial combination, the United States Supreme Court upheld the imposition of the death penalty by a polarizing five-to-four vote. Because no procedure is perfect, the Court simplistically asserted that the public must simply be willing to accept some mistakes.
In Ford v. Wainwright, in 1986, the United States Supreme Court determined that death row inmates could be “made sane through medicational therapy” prior to execution, although the Constitution continues to prohibit the execution of the literally insane. Although the Constitution also prohibits the execution of persons under the age of sixteen, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Stanford v. Kentucky, in 1989, that a state’s statute subjecting sixteen year olds to the death penalty was constitutional, noting that a majority of the states that administered the death penalty authorized the execution of sixteen year olds. Most states also provide for, and the Supreme Court has endorsed the principle of, execution of the mentally retarded.
Of the approximately 3,000 persons on death row in the United States today, more than one-half are white, with the balance of the death row population primarily African-American, with approximately 10% Hispanic or Native American. In a
1990 study of race and capital punishment, the United States General Accounting Office said, “In 82% of the studies, the race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty.” For example, since 1977, 85% of those executed in Utah killed a white person, compared to only 11% executed for killing black persons.
Racial bias also creeps into prosecutorial decisions on whether to pursue the death penalty. Prosecutors usually pursue capital punishment in serial or unusually grisly killings. “Middle ground” situations, such as the killing of a shopkeeper in a robbery, where prosecutors exhibit more judgment in determining sentencing, are more likely to be tainted by bias. In a highly regarded study conducted by David Baldus, Professor of Law at the University of Iowa, the numbers reveal that with “middle ground” murders, the chance of the death penalty being imposed in cases with white victims was double that of cases involving black victims. In the past 19 years since 1976, 88 black men have been executed for killing whites, while only two white men have been executed for killing blacks. In Spinkellink v. Wainwright, the decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1978, the Florida Attorney General had expressly contended that capital punishment normally was not merited in cases involving black crime victims. The State maintained that “murders involving black victims have, in the past, generally been qualitatively different from murders involving white victims; as a general rule murders involving black victims have not presented facts and circumstances appropriate for imposition of the death penalty. Murders involving black victims have in the past fallen into the categories of the family quarrels, lovers quarrels, liquor quarrels, and barroom
quarrels.”
In addition to thousands of persons legally executed by the state, there have been over 4,000 incidents of lynchings in the United States. It is no coincidence that states with high incidence of capital punishment have been some of the states historically with high incidence of unlawful lynching. For example, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Florida are among the states with the highest concentrations of capital punishment inflicted by the state today; these were also among the most notorious, leading states during the regime of unlawful racist lynching for many decades in this country.
This from St. John’s Law Center.
Dear reader, do you agree that the death penalty is racist and classist? Why or why not?
