Is the death penaly racist?

John Perazzo:

Of the more than 3,500 prisoners on death row, about 42.5 percent are African American, 8.4 percent are Hispanic, and 46.5 percent are white. Blacks, who comprise scarcely 13 percent of the U.S. population, are obviously quite over represented among those awaiting execution to the dismay of the U.N. panel members. But any disparity between the black presence on death row and the black presence in the overall population is utterly impertinent. The only relevant number is that over the past forty years, black killers have committed fully 54 percent of our nation’s murders. Given that fact, there is no basis for claims that our courts systematically, unfairly impose capital punishment on black defendants. We can draw a logical parallel with the case of men, who also, at first glance, appear to be "over represented" on death row. Indeed about 98.5 percent of all prisoners awaiting execution are males. Would either the U.N. panel or any reasonable person conclude, from this, that a sexist American justice system discriminates against men? Of course not. The numbers simply reflect the reality of the streets: men commit an overwhelming percentage of homicides; women commit very few.

There is much additional evidence discrediting the claim that African American defendants are likelier to get death sentences than are their white counterparts. A Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis found that 1.6 percent of whites arrested for murder or non-negligent manslaughter are sentenced to death, compared to just 1.2 percent of blacks arrested for those same offenses. Moreover, whites who kill whites are statistically likelier to get death sentences than blacks who kill whites, just as whites who kill blacks are slightly more likely to be on death row than blacks who kill blacks. And finally, whites on death row are likelier than blacks to actually have their death sentences carried out. Indeed from 1977 to 1996, 7.2 percent of whites on death row were executed, compared to 5.9 percent of African Americans. This should be regarded as good news by all decent people who oppose racially discriminatory sentencing patterns. Unfortunately, the aforementioned facts proved to be too esoteric for the U.N. committee’s simplistic report to consider.

If American courts were systematically biased in imposing the death penalty against blacks who deserved a better fate, we would expect to find that black defendants on death row have cleaner criminal records than their white counterparts. But precisely the opposite is true. Black death-row inmates are 10 percent likelier to have had felony convictions, and 20 percent likelier to have had homicide convictions, prior to the crimes that put them on death row. We can only wonder why the good folks at the U.N. failed to mention this amidst their dramatic denunciations of our "racist" justice system.

Because obviously no honest case can be made for the notion that black killers in general are disproportionately sent to death row, capital punishment’s opponents have had to find creative ways of demonstrating that the American justice system values white lives more than black lives. Perhaps the most commonly cited "proof" centers around a Georgia study that found the victims’ race to be highly correlated with the imposition of capital punishment. Specifically, it was found that blacks who killed whites received the death penalty 11 percent of the time, whereas blacks who killed blacks were sentenced to death just 1 percent of the time.

Yet while these numbers may, at first blush, appear to incriminate the justice system, we must keep in mind that convicted killers cannot be executed in accordance with the whims and prejudices of judges and juries; that the law in fact requires that certain aggravating circumstances be proven before any murderer can be put to death. Among these circumstances are armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, mutilation, execution-style shooting, torture, and extreme physical brutality. The most notable study on this subject found that black-on-white murders occurred in conjunction with one or more of these variables far more frequently than did black-on-black murders. Fully 67 percent of black-on-white homicides, for instance, involved armed robberies as compared to just 7 percent of black-on-black homicides.

Black-on-black killings were most commonly drug- or family-related categories that typically do not qualify for the death penalty. Indeed, 73 percent of those black-on-black homicides were "hot-blooded" incidents that occurred between relatives or acquaintances fighting at home or in their own neighborhoods. Black-on-white killings, by contrast, tended to be the more "cold-blooded," calculated, and brutal types of crimes that society punishes most severely.

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