In a press release, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) released, “Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty.” The report provides an in-depth look at the historical role that race has played in the death penalty and details the pervasive role racial discrimination continues to play in the administration of capital punishment today.
“The death penalty has been used to enforce racial
hierarchies throughout United States history, beginning with the colonial
period and continuing to this day,” said Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s Senior Director
of Research and Special Projects and the report’s lead author. “Its
discriminatory presence as the apex punishment in the American legal system
legitimizes all other harsh and discriminatory punishments. That is why the
death penalty must be part of any discussion of police reform, prosecutorial
accountability, reversing mass incarceration, and the criminal legal system as
a whole.” Ms. Ndulue previously served as the NAACP’s Senior Director of
Criminal Justice Programs and as a capital appeals lawyer.
“Racial disparities are present at every stage of a
capital case and get magnified as a case moves through the legal process,” said
Robert Dunham, DPIC’s Executive Director and the report’s editor. “If you don’t
understand the history — that the modern death penalty is the direct descendant
of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow-segregation — you won’t understand why.
With the continuing police and white vigilante
killings of Black citizens, it is even more important now to focus attention on
the outsized role the death penalty plays as an agent and validator of racial
discrimination. What is broken or intentionally discriminatory in the criminal
legal system is visibly worse in death-penalty cases. Exposing how the system
discriminates in capital cases can shine an important light on law enforcement
and judicial practices in vital need of abolition, restructuring, or reform.”
The report documents the historic role of the U.S.
death penalty as an instrument of social control. During slavery, capital
punishment was a tool for controlling Black populations and curbing rebellions.
After the Civil War, public officials promised legal executions as a means to
discourage lynchings. As lynchings decreased in the early 20th century,
executions began to take their place in circumstances that earlier would have
drawn a lynch mob. Across the South, African-American men were condemned and
executed for the alleged rape or attempted rape of white women or girls. No
white man was ever executed for raping a Black woman or girl.
Racial bias persists today, as evidenced by cases
with white victims being more likely to be investigated and capitally charged;
systemic exclusion of jurors of color from service in death-penalty trials; and
disproportionate imposition of death sentences against defendants of
color. The report provides compelling evidence of racial bias in the
modern death penalty, including:
- A 2015 meta-analysis of 30 studies
showed that the killers of white people were more likely than the killers of
Black people to face a capital prosecution.
- A study in North Carolina showed that
qualified Black jurors were struck from juries at more than twice the rate of
qualified white jurors. As of 2010, 20 percent of those on the state’s death
row were sentenced to death by all-white juries.
- Since executions resumed in 1977, 295
African-American defendants have been executed for the murder of a white
victim, while only 21 white defendants have been executed for the murder of an
African-American victim.
- A 2014 mock jury study of more than 500
Californians found that white jurors were more likely to sentence poor Latinx
defendants to death than poor white defendants.
- Exonerations of African Americans for murder convictions are 22 percent more likely to be linked to police misconduct.
ToTo read the report CLICK HERE
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