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Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society.
Discrimination based on skin color, also known as colorism, or shadeism, is a form of prejudice and/or discrimination in which people who share similar ethnicity traits or perceived race are treated differently based on the social implications that come with the cultural meanings that are attached to skin color.
In the United States, capital punishment is a legal penalty in 27 states, American Samoa, by the federal government, and the military, and is abolished in 23 states. Capital punishment is, in practice, only applied for aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, only 21 states have the ability to execute death sentences, with the other six, 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, Taiwan, and Singapore, 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.
San Quentin State Prison (SQ) is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Like rational choice theory, conflict theory, or functionalism, pure sociology is a sociological paradigm — a strategy for explaining human behavior. Developed by Donald Black as an alternative to individualistic and social-psychological theories, pure sociology was initially used to explain variation in legal behavior. Since then, Black and other pure sociologists have used the strategy to explain terrorism, genocide, lynching, and other forms of conflict management as well as science, art, and religion.
In the United States, the relationship between race and crime has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century. Crime rates vary significantly between racial groups. Most homicide victims in the United States are of the same race as the perpetrator.
The lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981, was one of the last reported lynchings in the United States. Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American, and hung his body from a tree. One perpetrator, Henry Hays, was executed by electric chair in 1997, while another, James Knowles, was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty and testifying against Hays. A third man was convicted as an accomplice and also sentenced to life in prison, and a fourth was indicted but died before his trial could be completed.
Lynching in the United States was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the victims of lynching in the U.S. were predominantly white Southerners during the first few decades of the phenomenon, after the South was defeated at the end of the American Civil War and roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated as a result, they became the primary targets of lynchings beginning in the Reconstruction era. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily targeted African Americans, Mexican Americans and other ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South because the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states.
Wesley Eugene Baker was an American convicted murderer executed by the U.S. state of Maryland. He was convicted for the June 6, 1991, murder of Jane Frances Tyson, a mother and grandmother, in front of two of her grandchildren in Catonsville. He was the last person to be executed in Maryland.
On June 15, 1920, three African-American circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, suspects in an assault case, were taken from the jail and lynched by a white mob of thousands in Duluth, Minnesota. Rumors had circulated that six African Americans had raped and robbed a nineteen-year-old white woman. A physician who examined her found no physical evidence of rape.
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. Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities.
The debate over capital punishment in the United States existed as early as the colonial period. As of December 2021, it remains a legal penalty within 27 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.
The criminal stereotype of African Americans in the United States is an ethnic stereotype according to which African Americans, and African American males in particular, are dangerous criminals. The origin of this stereotype is that as a demographic, they are proportionally over-represented in the numbers of those that are arrested for committing crimes: for example, according to official FBI statistics, in 2015, 51.1% of people arrested for homicide were African American, even though African American people account only for 13.4% of the total United States population. The figure of the African-American man as a criminal has appeared frequently in American popular culture, further reinforcing this image in the collective unconscious.
Racial inequality in the United States identifies the social inequality and advantages and disparities that affect different races within the United States. These can also be seen as a result of historic oppression, inequality of inheritance, or racism and prejudice, especially against minority groups.
Racial biases are a form of implicit bias, which refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect an individual's understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass unfavorable assessments, are often activated involuntarily and without the awareness or intentional control of the individual. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Police officers have implicit bias, regardless of their ethnicity. Racial bias in criminal news reporting in the United States is a manifestation of this bias.
The Equal Justice Initiative is a non-profit organization, based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial. It guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama in a death penalty case.
The relationship between race and capital punishment in the United States has been studied extensively. As of 2014, 42% of those on death row in the United States were black. Since 2002, there have been 12 executions of white defendants where the murder victim was black, however, there have been 178 executed defendants who were black with a white murder victim. 54% of people wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in the United States are black.
In the United States, use of deadly force by police has been a high-profile and contentious issue. In 2019, 1,004 people were killed by police shootings according to The Washington Post and 1,098 people were killed by police in total according to the "Mapping Police Violence" project.
In the context of Racism in the United States, racism against Black Americans dates back to the colonial era, and it continues to be a persistent issue in American society in the 21st century.
References
- ↑ "Contributors". American Journal of Sociology. 109 (2): i. 2003-09-01. doi:10.1086/381605. ISSN 0002-9602. S2CID 222436807.
- ↑ "David Jacobs". Department of Sociology. 2011-11-02. Retrieved 2017-12-10.
- ↑ Semelka, Sara (2009-06-25). "More police, less crime? It's not that easy". Columbia Daily Tribune. Retrieved 2017-12-10.
- ↑ "Study links lynchings, death sentences". UPI. 2005-09-27. Retrieved 2017-12-10.
- ↑ Company, Johnson Publishing (2007-08-20). "Blacks on Death Row Who Killed Whites More Likely To Be Executed". Jet. Johnson Publishing Company. p. 15.
- ↑ Conant, Eve (2007-07-31). "Study Finds Racial Disparity in Executions". Newsweek.
- ↑ Manuel R. Torres, entry “Marginalization,” in Richard T. Schaefer, editor, Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, Sage Publications, 2008, ISBN 978-1412926942, vol. 1, pp. 871–872.
