How does race affect the death penalty

Report: Death penalty cases show history of racial disparity. A new report by a think tank examining executions in the United States says death penalty cases show a long history of racial disparity, from who is executed to where and for what crimes.

The report also details several case studies in which race may be playing a role today, including Payne, accused of the stabbing deaths of Charisse Christopher and her 2-year-old daughter, Lacie Jo. Tennessee Department of Correction via AP. Connect with the definitive source for global and local news.

The Associated Press. As evidence for this claim, McCleskey presented the results of an extensive statistical study by Professor David Baldus of the University of Iowa Law Schooland his colleagues. This information allowed the researchers to control for hundreds of variables about the offender, victim and crime—thereby permitting a statistical comparison of cases in order to see what factors influenced whether a person was sentenced to death.

Professor Baldus found, among other things, that:. The Supreme Court held, however, that a death-sentenced defendant cannot challenge his sentence as a violation of the constitutional requirement of "equal protection of the laws" by showing that it is consistent with a system-wide pattern of racial disparity in capital sentencing.

To make out an equal-protection violation, a defendant is required to prove that some specific actor or actors in his or her individual case--the prosecutor or the judge or the jurors, for example, intentionally discriminated against the defendant on the ground of race in making a decision that resulted in the death sentence. Studies from across the nation have examined the influence of race in the application of the criminal justice system.

Some have shown that race remains a factor in various aspects of death penalty. In fact, race of victim disparities have been found in most death penalty states.

Year census data revealed that the racial composition of the United States was While these statistics might suggest that minorities are overrepresented on death row, the same statistical studies that have found evidence of race of victim effects in capital sentencing have not conclusively found evidence of similar race of defendant effects.

In fact, while some studies show that the race of the defendant is correlated with death sentences, no researcher has made definitive findings that the death sentence is being imposed on defendants on account of their race, per se, independently of other variables such as type of crime which are correlated with defendants' race.

Earlier in the twentieth century when it was applied for the crime of rape, 89 percent of the executions involved black defendants, most for the rape of a white woman. In the modern era, when executions have been carried out exclusively for murder, 75 percent of the cases involve the murder of white victims, even though blacks and whites are about equally likely to be victims of murder.

A bias towards white-victim cases has been found in almost all of the sophisticated studies exploring this area over many years.

These studies typically control for other variables in the cases studied, such as the number of victims or the brutality of the crime, and still found that defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death if they killed a white person. The issue of racial disparities in the use of the death penalty was considered by the Supreme Court in Batson v. Kentucky In this case the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors may not use race as a factor in eliminating potential jurors from the jury pool.

Likewise, a former Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wrote explicit directions to his prosecutors on how to strike African-Americans from juries, without violating the Supreme Court's ruling. In , Kentucky became the first death penalty state to pass the Racial Justice Act, a law that prohibits the death penalty from being sought on the basis of race. In , David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth examined the death penalty rates among all death eligible defendants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between the years of and Nationwide, a General Accounting Office GAO report reviewed numerous studies of patterns of racial discrimination in death penalty sentencing.

Their review found that for homicides committed under otherwise similar circumstances, and where defendants had similar criminal histories, a defendant was several times more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim was white than if his victim was African American. Prosecutors have unfettered discretion in deciding which cases become capital cases, seeking the death penalty in approximately 1 percent of all capital eligible cases.

Twenty-four of the cases were against black defendants. In cases in which the defendant was black and the victim was white, Briley used 96 out of his jury challenges against African-Americans. In the fall of , The U.