Racial Bias In The Death Penalty Case Study

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).

This essay will critique “Race, Capital Punishment, and the Cost of Murder” by M. Cholbi. The critique will discuss and point out some unnecessary concepts and flaws in the author’s argument along with logical fallacies. The author appeals for a moratorium among capital punishment due to racial disparities. This essay will analyze the author’s paper on the subject of race and capital punishment. The subject of capital punishment is controversial, as some citizens believe capital punishment is unconstitutional.

1. Disparity of application of the death penalty is a researched and heavily discussed topic. There is no disparity applied to the death penalty due to race. Many individuals believe that discrimination against minorities directly contributes to the amount of offenders on death row that are African American, Hispanic, or part of a different minority group. These trends exist for a reason, however I believe the reason is due to the fact that individuals strive to meet different goals dependent on their racial background. Currently, approximately 41 % of inmates on death row are black, and 44 % are white. There are more inmates who are white on death row, which makes it hard to determine that disparity was applied based on race or gender when individuals are faced with a death penalty sentence. There are far less women on death row. There are not many women on death row because the death penalty is not often applied to their cases. However, this is not due to their gender, it is based on the crimes that were committed and typically women commit less violent crimes than men.

Each year, approximately about 10,000 innocent people in the United States get convicted of serious crimes that they did not commit. And at least four percent of them receive the death penalty being completely innocent. Scenarios like this happen all the time because there are more and more false persecutions each day which can be easily avoided. Many people are occupying prisons all over the world, for felonies they did not execute. More than 200 people have been exonerated through DNA testing nationwide. But why do these wrongful convictions keep happening?

You brought up how jurors are more likely to find a defendant guilty when the defendant is a different race, and the victim is the same race as the juror, which creates a problem if race is being viewed as a primary factor in the case. Unfortunately, as we know, racial disparities are apparent throughout every phase of our justice system. For example, black individuals are three times as likely to have their cars searched by the police compared to their white counterparts, in addition to being more likely to be pulled over (Racial disparities, 2014). On a larger scale, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are also imposed much more harshly for black individuals than white individuals in the United States. Furthermore, black males in the

The death penalty is one of the most controversial issues on American soil. Blacks are more likely to face the death penalty than whites in the commission of identical crimes(CNN, 2014). The history of capital punishment dates back to the days before Christ. The Old Testament adage 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,' has survived throughout the ages despite the New Testament's rendition of 'thou shall not kill'. Today's American victims endure a more demure of style of cruel and unusual punishment; death by lethal injection has replaced the barbaric traditions of the past.

The ethnicity of a defendant in a capital case should not play a role whatsoever in their sentencing. However, it plays a significant and crucial role in deciding who receives capital punishment. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, minorities account for a disproportionate “43% of total executions since 1976 and 55% of those are currently awaiting execution.” An interesting piece of information that I found from the article was that only 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim was black which is disconcerting when compared to the 178 black defendants who have been executed for the murders of white victims. The racial disparities in these statistics are alarming and troublesome.

The article that I read from Amnesty USA was about how the race of homicide victims affects the results of whether or not a defendant in a capital case will receive the death penalty. The article provides a graph that showed how death row inmates who have killed white victims have been executed 77% of the time. However, death row inmates who have killed African American victims have only been executed 15% of the time. Since 1977, the vast majority of defendants in capital cases have been executed for killing white victims, even though African-Americans make up more than half of the total number of homicide victims.

While the topic can be overwhelming and complex, it is important to study the racist institution of the death penalty because execution is the ultimate expression of which individuals are valued by our society and which are considered dispensable. What the US expresses through its executions carries some racist undertones when we look at the races of the persons being executed, but it takes on a clearly racial direction when we consider the race of the original murder victim. For example, "the most comprehensive study of the death penalty found that killers of whites were eleven times more likely to be condemned to death than killers of African- Americans."3 On the flip side, "only 31 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person."4 In capital punishment, we find the modernday counterpart to lynching. Of course, lynching often meant sporadic acts of individual racism. Selective killing today is an official, bureaucratized act of the state and therefore an official statement of what our government stands for. And what the government stands for is the most complete disempowerment possible - death - for a large number of Black individuals.

The author of this article is Cornelia Grumman won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and found the organization the First Five Years Fund where she advocated for stronger federal policies. The audience she could be targeting would be the government to create stricter guidelines when imposing capital punishment. The purpose of this article is to give awareness of how race can create bias factors in the justice system. It has been commonly seen

The death penalty has become a racial problem as well. The US has struggled with prosecutors having and using their biases

"Since 1973, over eighty people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence" (Innocence and the Death Penalty 1). Statistics say that of the three-thousand six hundred people on death row right now, at least one hundred of them are innocent (Capital Punishment 1). When an innocent person is executed, the real killer is still on the streets ready to victimize someone else (Pragmatic Arguments 1). The most important problem is that when an innocent person is executed, they represent another human being who did not deserve to die.

The death penalty is racist, and has been applied in racially-discriminated ways. African American men are disproportionately sentenced to capital punishment. It is easier for African Americans to obtain the death penalty, there are poor judgment calls within the criminal justice system. (Commondreams 2016)

If you are of a different color or race you will most likely be the most affected. In Race, Conceptions of Crime and Justice, and Support for the Death Penalty, the author writes, “therefore among blacks, the perception of fairness both in the procedural treatment of minorities and in sentencing decisions may be significant factors in determining attitudes toward the death penalty” (Young 69). This shows how racial biases are indeed continuously being used not only for the death penalty, but for other cases too, and how it plays a big part on who’s executed. In The enduring racial divide in death penalty support, the authors state, “Whites are significantly more supportive of capital punishment than are Blacks. Bohm (1991) reported that the Black-White difference in death penalty support (a mean difference of approximately twenty percentage points across the numerous Gallup polls) was greater than that observed for any other socio-demographic characteristic” (qtd in. Cochran & Chamlin 85).Again this shows the unfairness minorities face every day. No matter what the crime is people always suspect it was performed by any other race except for whites. This is one of the many wrong acts death penalty does and it plays a big reason on why it should be

The extent of this issue was first brought to my attention while reading Chapter 3, “The Color of Justice” in The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander first. This chapter brought up the case of Warren McCleskey, a “black man facing the death penalty for killing a white police officer during an armed robbery in Georgia (Alexander, 2010, p.109). He had challenged the original ruling of his case (being sentenced to death), stating that “Georgia’s death penalty scheme was infected with racial bias and thus