critical thinking

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Part 1:

The chapter begins with an overview of major death penalty cases and then moves on to an examination of the historical overview of race and the death penalty and begins with “Slave era capital crimes and slave owner compensation in Virginia.” Racial disparity in the application of the death penalty is not new in this country. There has always been debate and discussion concerning the death penalty and it is no different today.

Many states have repealed the death penalty. Has yours? David V. Baker, in “Trends in the Use of Capital Punishment: At the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century” (in Visions for Change: Crime and Justice in the Twenty-First Century) offers that despite the fact that at least one convicted murderer a week is put to death in a state penitentiary, the death penalty is a rare occurrence compared to the overall murder rate in the United States. Currently, the execution rate is about one execution for every 700 committed murders and one execution for every 325 convictions for murder (p. 386).

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One early death penalty scholar summarized the pattern of selective imposition of capital punishment in the US this way: “The death penalty in this country is predominantly and disproportionately imposed upon Negroes, the poor, and the less educated, and men.” This is an important observation because over the last several decades many criminal justice researchers have asserted that the U.S. criminal justice system is devoid of racial bias. Early research indicates that the race of the defendant and the race of the victim were significant factors in jurisdictional imposition of the death penalty.

In one of the most methodologically powerful studies or racial bias in capital cases, David Baldus analyzed 2484 murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases in Georgia between 1973 and 1979. He controlled from some 230 nonracial variables and found that none of the factors accounted for disparities in capital sentences among different defendant-victim racial categories (p. 212).

However, there are some factors that should make us think about the whether racial bias enters into the death penalty discussion.

Some believe that the prosecutors’ ability to choose death penalty cases without review is a problem. Race and gender-based discrimination continues to characterize prosecutors’ discretion in selecting death penalty cases. One result of what some call racist prosecutorial discretion in selecting death penalty cases is that 81 percent of all capital cases involve white victims, while nationally only half of all murder victims are white. This means that most inmates on death row are there because they killed a white person as opposed to a person of color.

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Since 1876 death penalty officials have executed 14 white defendants for killing blacks but 211 black defendants for killing whites — revealing that authorities are more than 15 times more likely to execute black defendants with white victims than white defendants with black victims.State and federal prosecutors use peremptory challenges as a procedural device to remove potential jurors during voir dire for unexplained reasons. As one Colorado judge puot it, “the peremptory challenge is the last best tool of Jim Crow”(p. 398). State attorneys continue to use peremptory challenges in capital cases to openly discriminate against blacks and Latinos in jury selection. Prosecutors are not only more likely than defense attorneys to direct peremptory challenges against blacks, they also prefer white jurors to black jurors in capital cases because they believe that white juries are more prone to convict black defendants. Still, it is nearly impossible to make the case of racial discrimination when prosecutors use peremptory challenges because the courts permit almost any conceivable justification for peremptory challenges, however, arbitrary or irrational. In one case, the U.S. Supreme Court approved a prosecutor’s “race neutral reason for striking a black from prospective jury service on the basis that the juror’s long, unkempt hair, mustache and beard looked “suspicious” to him. The Court, in his opinion, wrote “what it means by a legitimate reason is not a reason that makes sense, but a reason that does not deny equal protection” (p. 390).

Prosecutorial misconduct is another reason and efforts to deter this misconduct have proven largely unsuccessful. In one example, the Chicago Tribune found hundreds of homicide cases in which prosecutors concealed or fabricated evidence. In other cases, prosecutors used threats against defendants or their families to coerce confessions. Research has found that prosecutors who engage in misconduct are often elevated to the bar as judges (p. 391). Attempts to rein in prosecutors are futile as the law immunizes them from civil suits.

Government statistics reveal that more than half of the prison and jail population suffer from mental health problems. Experts agree that a large proportion of these inmates suffer from mental illnesses that should preclude them being subjected to the death penalty. The Supreme Court has not barred state or federal courts from executing mentally ill persons unless the mental illness renders the inmate legally insane.

Question?.
So, after this bizarre journey into the history of death penalty issues, what do you think? Is the death penalty racially biased in this country? What evidence can you provide?
Part 2:

See the following javascript:void(0);/*1360606771106* Post a reflection.

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