667 Murder Accusations

Professor Michael Tonry is the McKnight Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and Policy, director of the Institute on Crime and Public Policy of the University of Minnesota. He is one of the leading scholars of crime and punishment who has put race and race disparity at for front of the American Criminal Justice System and written many scholarly books on the topic. In his other works he has shaped an image of how racially minded the Criminal Justice System is and how such injustice has been applied to African Americans. Based on Tonry`s credentials, the book reviewed in this paper complies valuable and trustworthy statistics and information, and also author`s own experience in this particular field. The book “Punishing Race: A Continuing American Dilemma” is a work of Michael Tonry in which he tries to address the issue of disparity and discrimination toward African Americans and how systematically attitudes and mind set have shaped laws and limitations by the government on this particular group of American society.

There is also a large disparity between races when it comes to sentencing convicts to Death Row. Looking just at the federal death penalty data released by the Department of Justice between 1995 and 2000, 682 defendants were charged with death-eligible crimes. Out of those 682 defendants, the defendant was black 48% of the cases, Hispanic in 29% of the cases, and white in only 20% of the cases (Coker, 2003).

Baldus study was based on more than two thousand murder cases in Georgia, and “the study found that defendants charged with killing white victims received the death penalty eleven times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims.” (Alexander p.110) Baldus Study was significant to this chapter because it shows patterns of discrimination and how the government and police enforcement use race to harass African Americans.

At the prosecution stage, African Americans are subject to racially biased charges and plea agreements (TLC, 2011). African Americans are less likely to have their charges dismissed or reduced or to receive any kind of alternate sentencing than their white counterparts (TLC, 2011). In the last stage, the finding of guilt and sentencing, the decisions of jurors may be affected by race (Toth et al, 2008) African Americans receive racially discriminatory sentences from judges (TLC, 2011). A New York study from 1990 to 1992 revealed one-third of minorities would have receive a lesser sentence if they were treated the same as white and there would have been a 5 percent decrease in African Americans sent to prison during that time period if they had received the same probation privileges (TLC, 2011). African Americans receive death sentences more than whites who have committed similar crimes (Toth et al, 2008). Because of the unfair treatment from the beginning to the end of the justice system there is an over represented amount of African Americans in prison (Toth et al, 2008). Some of the problems faced by African Americans in prison are gangs, racial preferences given to whites, and unfair treatment by prison guards (Toth et al, 2008).

Nearly 80 percent of murder victim in cases resulting in an execution have been white while 50 percent of murder victims are white 82 percent was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty.Senator RussFeingold stated "we simply cannot say we live in a country that offers equal justice to all Americans when racial disparities plague the system by which our society imposes the ultimate punishment" (senator RussFeingold 108th congress 2003). A 2007 report concluded that one-third of African American death row inmates in Philadelphia would have received sentence of life improsement if they had not been African-American.In 1990, non-partisan US General Accounting found a pattern of evidence Indicating racial Disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of death penalty (Feb 1,2001)."Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life"(Writer Activist and Civil Rights Leader Coretta Scott King Feb7, 2006).

The article that I read about the racial bias of the death penalty in the U.S. by David Love explained how southern states are responsible for the vast majority of African American executions in the United States. Love explicitly stated that “the application of the U.S. death penalty is unfair, arbitrary, and racially biased.” Most disturbingly, the article explained that whether or not a capital punishment defendant receives the death penalty does not depend on the facts of the case but more so on the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. Moreover, even the county in which the case was prosecuted can play a role in capital punishment sentencing.

There has been major sources of racial discrimination in our nation's criminal justice system, the selective prosecution of African-Americans in particular. The American criminal justice system must recognize that the racial inequities have poisoned the criminal justice system. The American system of justice is a racially biased, two-tiered system; one for minorities and one for whites. In particular, African-Americans are disproportionately targeted, arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to long mandatory prison terms and execution (www.crimenet.org). The U. S. has gone from prison and jail population of about 300,00 to more than 2 million, most assume that this surge in imprisonment was due to a surge in violent crime but when incarceration

White Americans receive favorable treatment due to racial disparity in the justice system due to a modern stereotype that, based on the color of your skin, you are considered a threat. There are many cases of wrongful convictions based on skin color – a man of color will often receive a longer sentence than a white man. Of course, there has always been racism in the world – it is inescapable. In a report by Samuel Gross, “Race and Wrongful Convictions”, he claims, “African Americans are more than seven times more likely to be imprisoned for murder than white Americans, and more than six times as likely to be killed in a homicide” (Gross). Considering this, it is clear there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Currently, the American justice system is biased in its treatment of black men and for society to progress, this issue

To look closely at many of the mechanisms in American society is to observe the contradiction between constitutional equality and equality in practice. Several of these contradictions exist in the realm of racial equality. For example, Black s often get dealt an unfair hand in the criminal justice system. In The Real War on Crime, Steven Donziger explains,

Being sent to Death Row is the highest prosecution a criminal could be sentenced to and the process when determining of someone deserves a death sentence is a very bias decision. Since 1977 when capital punishment was restored there has been about 20,600 homicides and only about .7 death sentences for every 100 homicides has been given in the Cook county. The decision to impose a death sentence is not only based on the crime done but also the race of the victim. Attorneys at a state level has a less formal guide when giving death sentences. It is commonly seen how race plays a major role in the justice system. As apart of attorney protocol of determining if the death sentence is given it is seen black males will be given a higher sentence versus a white male even if the crimes where similar. In this article “Disparities on Death Row” published in Grumman points out the unjustness in the justice system. Through ethos, pathos, and logos Cornelia Grumman effectively persuades her audience to spread the issues of capital punishment assignment.

According to the Death Penalty Center, in 1973 38 Black people were sentence for death row. Other races were charge with the same crime but Black people were issued death row. Our courts system demonstrates factors that are played in history and today’s society. Black life is not valued in the United States. The Stanford Law Review published a study that found similar patterns of racial disparity, based on the race of the victim, in Arkansas, Florida,Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Virginia (see

Racism has always been an issue in our society. Throughout history, minorities have been misrepresented in the justice system, especially in cases where the outcome is death. In early American History, blacks were hanged for breaking any informal laws. Back then, killings occurred without any type of dues process. In the 1960s the National Association for the Advancement of African Americans (NAACP) believed that African Americans received the death penalty more frequently than members of other groups. “According to data from Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 55% of death row inmates are black or Hispanic”

Fifty-five percent of those on death row in the US, currently awaiting execution are people of colour while they merely account for twenty-seven percent of the population. In 2006, the UN Human Rights Committee suggested the US, “assess the extent to which [the] death penalty is disproportionately imposed on ethnic minorities and on low- income population groups, as well as the reasons for this, and adopt all appropriate measures to address the problem”.

Dwight Conquergood wrote about how the legal system in America tried to normalise capital punishment to make it seem less cruel by introducing other ways of execution. This was done by using the lethal injection as in McVeigh?s case (Conquergood, 2002). He advocates against the use of capital punishment and in his discussion highlighted that he attended many demonstrations with those against capital punishment. In addition, he highlights that there is bias from authorities when handling death cases. In one of the cases, the police lost documents which would have been given to the defense lawyers to fight against the sentence. However, the individual was put to death and he considered that death penalty to be unfair and unjust and that there has been instances of innocent people being on death row. He highlighted that minorities make up the largest number of prisoners on the death penalty despite representing a small percentage of the small population and argued that there was bias against certain minorities. The author indicated that African-Americans are 19% more likely to be put on death row as compared to other races even though they might have committed the same crime (Conquergood, 2002). His view can be put into quadrant 1A which refers to dignity obtained by being a human being (Kirchhoffer, 2013). However, when one is on death row, this dignity is taking away and therefore he argues that offenders

After viewing the National Geographic documentary titled “Death Row Texas”, I found myself grieving the loss of my father. Preceding my father’s death, he was an employee of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) working as a Correctional Officer at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, known as the “Walls Unit”. Over the years, some of the stories that my father shared with me regarding TDCJ unfair system has me struggling with this question, particularly since TDCJ designed the system to oppress people of color through the act of mass incarceration, life in prison, and the death sentence according to a news article published by the New Yorker titled, “The Caging of America”. In the United States of America, White Americans have been murdering innocent African-Americans for centuries without punishments for their crimes, and yet today this behavior continues throughout our criminal justice system. According to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Texas alone has accounted for more than 30% of the executions in the United States, and over the past five years, people of color make up 80% of the death sentences in Texas with more than 60% of the death sentences imposed on African-Americans. In response to the question whether Willie Earl Pondexter Jr., Johnny Ray Johnson and David Martinez deserve the death penalty, I am still undecided on my position due to my uncertainty regarding the usefulness in imposing the death sentence. Furthermore,