Race and capital punishment in the United States

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The relationship between race and capital punishment in the United States has been studied extensively. As of 2014, 42 percent of those on death row in the United States were Black. [1] As of October 2002, there were 12 executions of White defendants where the murder victim was Black, however, there were 178 executed defendants who were Black with a White murder victim. [2] Since then, the number of white defendants executed where the murder victim was black has increased to just 21 (less than 1.36 percent of all executions), whereas the number of Black defendants executed where the murder victim was White has increased to 299 (nearly 19.4 percent of all executions). [3] [4] 54 percent of people wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in the United States are black. [5]

Contents

Executions by race and race of victim

Since 1991, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has produced quarterly reports containing statistics related to capital punishment in the United States. The reports include a breakdown of the death row population by race, the race of those executed, as well as the race of the victims in each case. [6]

White defendant, white victim

The number of white defendants executed for killing a white victim remains the highest percentage out of all racial combinations. As of January 2022, 796 white people had been executed for killing a white victim, making up 51.69 percent of all 1,540 executions. [4] The percentage has remained consistent since 2000, when it was at 51.85 percent, and in 2010, at 52.52 percent. [7] [8]

Black defendant, white victim

The number of black defendants executed for killing a white victim remains the second highest percentage out of all racial combinations. As of January 2022, 297 black people had been executed for killing a white victim, making up 19.29 percent of all executions. [4] The percentage has decreased in recent years, with it being 24.31 percent in 2000, and 20.44 percent in 2010. However, the percentage drop is less between 2010 and 2020 than it was between 2000 and 2010. [7] [8]

Black defendant, black victim

The number of black defendants executed for killing a black victim is lower than the number of black defendants executed for killing a white victim. As of January 2022, 181 black people had been executed for killing a black victim, making up 11.75 percent of all executions. [4] Robert Wayne Williams was the first black person to be executed for killing a black victim since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. [9]

White defendant, black victim

Executions of white defendants for killing black victims are rare. The number of white people executed for killing a black person is significantly lower than all other racial combinations. As of January 2022, just 21 white people had been executed for killing a black victim, making up only 1.36 percent of all executions. [4] While the percentage is slightly higher than what it was in 2010 (1.22 percent) it is lower than what it was in 2000 (1.69 percent). [7] [8]

Studies

Baldus

In 1983, David Baldus co-authored a study that found that capital punishment in Georgia since the decision in Furman v. Georgia was handed down in 1972 had been applied unevenly across race. Specifically, his and his colleagues' study found that only 15 out of 246 murder cases (6 percent) where the victim was black resulted in a death sentence, as compared with 85 out of 348 (24 percent) of such cases when the victim was white. [1] [10] This study led to Warren McCleskey's death sentence being challenged due to allegations that it was racially biased. Those allegations resulted in the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp that statistical evidence of bias in the criminal justice system is insufficient to overturn an individual's sentence. [1] In 1998, Baldus published another study which concluded that black defendants in certain types of murder cases in Philadelphia were almost four times as likely to be sentenced to death than were their white counterparts. [11]

Kleck

In 1981, Gary Kleck published a literature review that declared that all states, except the Southern United States, found that African Americans were less likely than white Americans to be sentenced to death or executed. The review also found that cases with black victims were less likely than those with white victims to result in the death sentence, possibly as a result of the devaluing of black crime victims. [12]

Radelet

A 1981 study by Michael Radelet found that murder cases involving white victims were more likely to result in a death sentence than were those involving black victims, mainly because those accused of murdering whites were more likely to be indicted for first-degree murder. The same study found that after controlling for the race of the victim, there was no clear evidence that the race of the defendant predicted how likely they were to receive a death sentence. [13]

Dwayne Smith

A 1987 study by M. Dwayne Smith of Tulane University found a racial bias in capital punishment cases in Louisiana, but only with regard to the race of the victim, not the offender. [14]

Ekland-Olson

A 1988 study by Sheldon Ekland-Olson found that in the first decade after Furman, criminal cases in Texas involving white victims were more likely to result in a death sentence than those involving either black or Hispanic victims. [15]

Government Accountability Office

A 1990 Government Accountability Office analysis of 28 studies, in 82 percent of these studies, found that murder cases with white victims were more likely than those with black victims to result in a death sentence. The report described this relationship as "remarkably consistent across data sets, states, data collection methods, and analytic techniques." [16]

Sorensen & Wallace

A 1995 study by Jonathan Sorensen and Donald H. Wallace found evidence of a racial bias in capital punishment in Missouri, mainly in regards to the race of the victim. The study found that cases with white victims were more likely to result in death sentences, and that cases with black victims were less likely to result in such sentences. The study also reported that these disparities were largest when "prosecutors and jurors are freed from the seriousness of the cases to consider other factors." [17] A 1999 study by the same authors found that murder cases with black defendants and white victims were more likely than those with any other combination of defendant and victim races to "result in first-degree murder charges, to be served notice of aggravating circumstances, and to proceed to capital trial." [18]

Eberhardt

A 2006 study led by Jennifer Eberhardt found that even after numerous other factors were controlled for, defendants who looked more stereotypically black in death penalty cases with white victims were more likely to be sentenced to death. People tend to see Black physical traits as directly related to criminality. The synthesis supported a strong race of victim influence. [19]

Alesina and La Ferrara

A 2014 study by Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara found evidence of racial bias in capital sentencing in that error rates tended to be higher in capital cases involving minority defendants and white victims. However, this pattern was only seen in Southern states. [20]

Butler et al

A study by Butler et al published in 2018 failed to replicate the findings of earlier studies that had concluded that white Americans are more likely to support the death penalty if informed that it is largely applied to black Americans; according to the authors, their findings "may result from changes since 2001 in the effects of racial stimuli on white attitudes about the death penalty or their willingness to express those attitudes in a survey context." [21]

Southern Racism Affecting the Enforcement of Capital Punishment During the Jim Crow Era

Societal Biases Within Jurisdictions

Racial and ethnic disparities in the employment of the death sentence have been significant in scope over the long arc of American history. The main cause is due to the pervasive societal prejudice in southern counties.

More than twice as many people were put to death in the South between 1866 and 1945 as there were in the Northeast. [22] . Local law enforcement and segregated juries continued to be pillars of racial discipline for a century after the Civil War. [23] .

Research demonstrates that black Americans' executions closely resemble lynchings, if only because killing a white person while black increases the likelihood of receiving the death penalty by a factor of up to seven. [24] . Another demonstration of societal prejudice is when four Atlanta police officers visited Rosa South's house in 1940 and took her 16-year-old son, Quintar South, away to be interrogated. [25] . Ten days later, a newspaper revealed that an officer had used an electric iron to torture the child in order to coerce a confession. This case highlights three aspects of the history of police torture of African Americans which inevitably led to biased punishment. First, juries in the South declined to convict police officers accused of engaging in this type of racial violence. Next, African American media, witnesses, and victims questioned police torture. Finally, white southern elites criticized police torture techniques, albeit ineffectively. [26] .

This exemplifies how Southern racial culture profoundly influenced the application of the death penalty and discrimination against African Americans during the Jim Crow era, attributable to societal biases. [ citation needed ]

Due to the link between capital punishment and African Americans in the United States, violence had a large impact on the death sentence.

There is ample proof that white supremacists exploited violence and made lynching a public spectacle to gain total control over the black population during the Jim Crow era [27] . After liberation, lynching took on the role of whipping as a public display of the unbridled power of white people over black people in the South. The well-defined and extensive pattern of racial violence in the South can be helpfully explained by the Wolfgang and Ferracuti theory of subcultural violence [28] . A complex system of standards, viewpoints, and behaviors reflecting a compelling theme of violence is necessary for the establishment of a subculture [29] .

A prominent example of this violence is the case of Ed Johnson, who died at the hands of a white lynch mob on March 19, 1906 [30] . In truth, a lynch mob killed Mr. Johnson, shot him, and had his body dismembered. Additionally, his attorneys frequently received threats of murder. Nearly 5,000 lynchings are thought to have occurred in the South between 1882 and 1968. Lynching was a kind of racial prejudice and bigotry that aimed to prove that people who were white were superior to people who were black. Essentially, violence and lynching were tactics employed to uphold racial caste divisions and put black individuals in a subservient position.

Due to the numerous atrocities that Southern racial culture perpetrated against African Americans throughout the Jim Crow era, extreme implications came to fruition. One of the most important of these implications is the tendency of violence, which significantly influenced the use of the death penalty against African Americans.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Capital punishment in the United States</span> Legal penalty in the United States

In the United States, capital punishment is a legal penalty throughout the country at the federal level, in 27 states, and in American Samoa. It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C. It is usually applied for only the most serious crimes, such as aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, 20 states have the ability to execute death sentences, with the other seven, as well as the federal government, being subject to different types of moratoriums. The existence of capital punishment in the United States can be traced to early colonial Virginia. Along with Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, the United States is one of four advanced democracies and the only Western nation that applies the death penalty regularly. It is one of 54 countries worldwide applying it, and was the first to develop lethal injection as a method of execution, which has since been adopted by five other countries. The Philippines has since abolished executions, and Guatemala has done so for civil offenses, leaving the United States as one of four countries to still use this method. It is common practice for the condemned to be administered sedatives prior to execution, regardless of the method used.

The U.S. state of Washington enforced capital punishment until the state's capital punishment statute was declared null and void and abolished in practice by a state Supreme Court ruling on October 11, 2018. The court ruled that it was unconstitutional as applied due to racial bias however it did not render the wider institution of capital punishment unconstitutional and rather required the statute to be amended to eliminate racial biases. From 1904 to 2010, 78 people were executed by the state; the last was Cal Coburn Brown on September 10, 2010. In April 2023, Governor Jay Inslee signed SB5087 which formally abolished capital punishment in Washington State and removed provisions for capital punishment from state law.

Capital punishment was abolished in Virginia on March 24, 2021, when Governor Ralph Northam signed a bill into law. The law took effect on July 1, 2021. Virginia is the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty, and the first southern state in United States history to do so.

McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), is a United States Supreme Court case, in which the death sentence of Warren McCleskey for armed robbery and murder was upheld. The Court said the "racially disproportionate impact" in the Georgia death penalty indicated by a comprehensive scientific study was not enough to mitigate a death penalty determination without showing a "racially discriminatory purpose." McCleskey has been described as the “most far-reaching post-Gregg challenge to capital sentencing.”

Whitus v. Georgia, 385 U.S. 545 (1967), found in favor of the petitioner (Whitus), who had been convicted for murder, and as such reversed their convictions. This was due to the Georgia jury selection policies, in which it was alleged racial discrimination had occurred.

The Capital Jury Project (CJP) is a consortium of university-based research studies on the decision-making of jurors in death penalty cases in the United States. It was founded in 1991 and is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goal of the CJP is to determine whether jurors' sentencing decisions conform to the constitution and do not reflect the arbitrary decisions the United States Supreme Court found when it ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia. That 1972 Supreme Court decision eliminated the death penalty, which was not reinstated until Gregg v. Georgia in 1976.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Race in the United States criminal justice system</span>

Race in the United States criminal justice system refers to the unique experiences and disparities in the United States in regard to the policing and prosecuting of various races. There have been different outcomes for different racial groups in convicting and sentencing felons in the United States criminal justice system. Although prior arrests and criminal history is also a factor. Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities.

Capital punishment was abolished in Colorado in 2020. It was legal from 1974 until 2020 prior to it being abolished in all future cases.

David Christopher Baldus was a Joseph B. Tye professor of law at the University of Iowa. He held the position from 1969 until his death in 2011. His research focused on law and social science and he conducted extensive research on the death penalty in the United States.

The debate over capital punishment in the United States existed as early as the colonial period. As of April 2022, it remains a legal penalty within 28 states, the federal government, and military criminal justice systems. The states of Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Washington abolished the death penalty within the last decade alone.

Capital punishment in South Africa was abolished on 6 June 1995 by the ruling of the Constitutional Court in the case of S v Makwanyane, following a five-year and four-month moratorium since February 1990.

Hanging has been practiced legally in the United States of America from before the nation's birth, up to 1972 when the United States Supreme Court found capital punishment to be in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Four years later, the Supreme Court overturned its previous ruling, and in 1976, capital punishment was again legalized in the United States. As of 2023, only New Hampshire has a law specifying hanging as an available secondary method of execution, and even then only for the one remaining capital punishment sentence in the state.

Capital punishment is currently a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Kansas, although it has not been used since 1965.

Capital punishment in Delaware was abolished after being declared unconstitutional by the Delaware Supreme Court on August 2, 2016. The ruling retroactively applies to earlier death sentences, and remaining Delaware death row inmates had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Despite this, the capital statute for first-degree murder under Title 11, Chapter 42, Section 09, of the Delaware Code has yet to be repealed, though it is unenforceable.

Capital punishment is a legal punishment in Pennsylvania. Despite remaining a legal penalty, there have been no executions in Pennsylvania since 1999, and only three since 1976. In February 2015, Governor Tom Wolf announced a formal moratorium on executions that is still in effect as of 2023, with incumbent Governor Josh Shapiro continuing Wolf's moratorium. However, capital crimes are still prosecuted and death warrants are still issued.

Raymond "Ray" Paternoster was an American criminologist who taught at the University of Maryland from 1982 until his death in 2017, spending some of this time as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice there.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert O'Neal (murderer)</span> Executed American murderer (1961–1995)

Robert Earl O'Neal Jr. was an American white supremacist and convicted murderer who was executed by the state of Missouri for the February 1984 murder of Arthur Dade, a 33-year-old black American man. O'Neal, who was serving a life sentence for the robbery and murder of 78-year-old Ralph Roscoe Sharick, stabbed Dade to death at the Missouri State Penitentiary. For the latter murder, O'Neal was sentenced to death and executed in 1995 at the Potosi Correctional Center via lethal injection. O'Neal is notable for being the only white person to be executed for killing a black person in the history of modern Missouri.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Asay</span> Executed American spree killer (1964–2017)

Mark James Asay was an American spree killer who was executed by the state of Florida for the 1987 racially motivated murders of two men in Jacksonville, Florida. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and subsequently executed in 2017 at Florida State Prison by lethal injection. Asay's execution generated attention as it was noted by multiple news agencies that he was the first white person to be executed in Florida for killing a black person. He was also the first person to be executed in the United States using the drug etomidate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Kerrick Majors</span> 1987 hate crime in Tennessee

On April 26, 1987, Kerrick Majors, a 14-year-old African-American boy, was tortured and murdered by three white drifters during a racially motivated hate crime in East Nashville, Tennessee. Majors was attacked by the trio after he and his friends accidentally broke a $2 vase at a flea market. Majors was kidnapped, tortured, beaten, and stabbed to death, while his attackers yelled racial slurs at him. His body was found the following day.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Ford, Matt (23 June 2014). "Racism and the Execution Chamber". The Atlantic. Retrieved 8 April 2016.
  2. ↑ "Race and the Death Penalty". ACLU. Retrieved 17 February 2021.
  3. ↑ "Executions by Race and Race of Victim". Death Penalty Information Center . Retrieved March 5, 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Deborah Fins. "Death Row U.S.A. Winter 2022" (PDF). NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund . Retrieved March 19, 2022.
  5. ↑ "Exonerations by race".
  6. ↑ "Death Row USA Quarterly Reports". NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund . Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  7. 1 2 3 Deborah Fins. "Death Row U.S.A. Summer 2000" (PDF). NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund . Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  8. 1 2 3 Deborah Fins. "Death Row U.S.A. Fall 2010" (PDF). NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund . Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  9. ↑ "Execution Database". Death Penalty Information Center . Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  10. ↑ Baldus, David; et al. (Fall 1983). "Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience". Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. 74 (3): 661–753. doi:10.2307/1143133. JSTOR   1143133.
  11. ↑ Baldus, David; et al. (1998). "Racial Discrimination and the Death Penalty in the Post-Furman Era: An Empirical and Legal Overview with Recent Findings from Philadelphia". Cornell Law Review. 83 (6): 1638–1770.
  12. ↑ Kleck, Gary (December 1981). "Racial Discrimination in Criminal Sentencing: A Critical Evaluation of the Evidence with Additional Evidence on the Death Penalty". American Sociological Review. 46 (6): 783–805. doi:10.2307/2095079. JSTOR   2095079.
  13. ↑ Radelet, Michael (December 1981). "Racial Characteristics and the Imposition of the Death Penalty". American Sociological Review. 46 (6): 918–927. doi:10.2307/2095088. JSTOR   2095088.
  14. ↑ Smith, M.Dwayne (January 1987). "Patterns of discrimination in assessments of the death penalty: The case of Louisiana". Journal of Criminal Justice. 15 (4): 279–286. doi:10.1016/0047-2352(87)90015-8.
  15. ↑ Ekland-Olson, Sheldon (December 1988). "Structured Discretion, Racial Bias, and the Death Penalty: The First Decade after "Furman" in Texas". Social Science Quarterly. 69 (4): 853–873.
  16. ↑ "Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates Pattern of Racial Disparities" (PDF). Government Accountability Office. 26 February 1990. Retrieved 30 April 2016.
  17. ↑ Sorensen, Jonathan R.; Wallace, Donald H. (Winter 1995). "Capital punishment in Missouri: Examining the issue of racial disparity". Behavioral Sciences & the Law. 13 (1): 61–80. doi:10.1002/bsl.2370130105.
  18. ↑ Sorensen, Jon; Wallace, Donald H. (September 1999). "Prosecutorial discretion in seeking death: An analysis of racial disparity in the pretrial stages of case processing in a midwestern county". Justice Quarterly. 16 (3): 559–578. doi:10.1080/07418829900094261.
  19. ↑ Eberhardt, J. L.; Davies, P. G.; Purdie-Vaughns, V. J.; Johnson, S. L. (1 May 2006). "Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes". Psychological Science. 17 (5): 383–386. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01716.x. PMID   16683924. S2CID   15737940.
  20. ↑ Alesina, Alberto; La Ferrara, Eliana (November 2014). "A Test of Racial Bias in Capital Sentencing". American Economic Review. 104 (11): 3397–3433. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.221.5995 . doi:10.1257/aer.104.11.3397. S2CID   9056323.
  21. ↑ Butler, Ryden; Nyhan, Brendan; Montgomery, Jacob M.; Torres, Michelle (2018-01-25). "Revisiting white backlash: Does race affect death penalty opinion?". Research & Politics. 5. doi: 10.1177/2053168017751250 .
  22. ↑ Allen, Howard and Jerome Clubb, Race, Class, and the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in American History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 126
  23. ↑ Maratea, R.J, Killing With Prejudice: Institutionalized Racism in American Capital Punishment (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 59
  24. ↑ Maratea, R.J, Killing With Prejudice: Institutionalized Racism in American Capital Punishment (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 60
  25. ↑ Amy Wood and Natalie Ring, Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 60
  26. ↑ Amy Wood and Natalie Ring, Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 61
  27. ↑ James Clarke, Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South, vol. 28 (British Journal of Political Science, 1998), 269
  28. ↑ James Clarke, Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South, vol. 28 (British Journal of Political Science, 1998), 273
  29. ↑ James Clarke, Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South, vol. 28 (British Journal of Political Science, 1998), 285
  30. ↑ Charles Ogletree, Black Man’s Burden: Race and the Death Penalty in America, vol. 81 (Oregon Law Review, 2002)
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