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CALIFORNIA / Death penalty study finds racial imbalance / Killers of whites much more likely to face execution

sfgate.com / Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer /
Thursday, September 22, 2005

California murder convicts are much more likely to receive death sentences if their victim is white rather than black or Latino, according to a study released Wednesday. The study, conducted by Glenn Pierce of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and Michael Radelet, sociology professor at the University of Colorado, found that people who kill whites are four times more likely to be sentenced to die than those who kill Latinos and three times more likely to get death sentences than those who kill African Americans.

The authors examined the resolutions of all California homicides committed between Jan. 1, 1990, and Dec. 31, 1999, using data from the FBI, the California Office of Vital Statistics and other sources. Pierce and Radalet concluded that the victim's race or ethnicity and the location of the crime affected who got a death sentence. Among the findings to be published in the Santa Clara Law Review are:
-- Eighty percent of the executions carried out in California from 1990 to 1999 were for the murders of white people, although whites made up 28 percent of the homicide victims in California during that decade.
-- A person convicted of first-degree murder in a predominantly white, rural county -- such as Napa, King, Colusa or Shasta counties -- was more than three times more likely to be sentenced to die than a person convicted of a similar crime in a diverse, urban county such as Los Angeles.
-- In the 1990s, no one was sentenced to death in 28 of California's 58 counties, including San Francisco, where there were 910 homicides during the decade.
-- African Americans were six times more likely to be homicide victims than whites.

"This study raises significant questions about whether the death penalty is administered fairly in this state," Donald Polden, dean of the Santa Clara University School of Law, said in a letter to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice....

Race and the Death Penalty
American Civil Liberties Union
February 26, 2003

The color of a defendant and victim's skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America. People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution. [...]

Race and the Death Penalty

February 26, 2003

The color of a defendant and victim's skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America. People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution. A moratorium of the death penalty is necessary to address the blatant prejudice in our application of the death penalty.

The jurisdictions with the highest percentages of minorities on its death row:

U.S. Military (86%)
Colorado (80%)
U.S. Government (77%)
Louisiana (72%)
Pennsylvania (70%)

While white victims account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80% of all Capital cases involve white victims. Furthermore, as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.

For many years reports from around the country have found that a pervasive racial prejudice in the application of the death penalty exists. In January 2003, researchers at the University of Maryland concluded in a study commissioned by the Maryland Governor that defendants are much more likely to be sentenced to death if they have killed a white person. [...] In August 2001, the New Jersey Supreme Court released a report which also found that the state's death penalty law is more likely to proceed against defendants who kill white victims.

In April 2001, researchers from the University of North Carolina released a study of all homicide cases in North Carolina between 1993 and 1997. The study found that the odds of getting a death sentence increased three and a half times if the victim was white rather than black....

Race and the Death Penalty - Is the Life of a White Person Worth More? (racerelations.about.com)
Your Guide, Susan Pizarro-Eckert
Race and the Death Penalty Issue
For decades, the debate about the death penalty has raged on. Race has always been, and continues to be a significant aspect of any discussion regarding the fairness and appropriateness of capital punishments. Following are recent findings, which highlight growing concerns regarding the fatal intersection between prejudice, racial power struggles and criminal justice.

The Penalty in Ohio
Recently, a comprehensive Ohio study concluded that in today's criminal justice system, who lives and who dies depends, in large part, on race. The Associated Press reviewed 1,936 indictments spanning from 1981 to 2002 and found that the only consistent thing about capital punishment in Ohio is that it has been been repeatedly applied in an uneven, almost arbitrary fashion. Clearly indicated was another disturbing trend: defendants facing the death penalty for killing a White person were twice as likely to be sentenced to death, than defendants charged with killing a Black person.

The Penalty in Kansas
A similar report in Kansas indicated that since the reinstatement of capital punishment in that particular state, 44 potential capital cases involved non-White victims and yet none resulted in a death sentence. On the other hand, eight defendants did receive death sentences. Their victims? White....

Racial Discrimination in Implementing the Death Penalty
By Ronald J. Tabak
American Bar Association
Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities

There is a long history of racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty in this country. Indeed, racial discrimination based on both the race of the defendant and the race of the victim was a principal reason why Justice Thurgood Marshall joined the Supreme Court majority that held in 1972 that the death penalty was unconstitutional. (Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 364-65 (1972) (Marshall, J., concurring).)

Unfortunately, the modern (post-Furman) death penalty continues to be pervaded by racial discrimination based on the race of the victim and, in some places, the race of the defendant. This has been shown in numerous studies that the independent U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) validated in 1990. (U.S. Gen. Accounting Office, Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates Pattern of Racial Disparities (1990).) The GAO found that in over 80 percent of the studies (23 of 28), the race of the victim correlated with getting the death penalty, i.e., that for otherwise similar 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 his victim were white than if his victim were African American. In the most validly conducted studies, the defendant was four or five times as likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was African American.

These results were remarkably consistent across data sets, time periods, states, and analytic techniques. The studies showed that race had its greatest impact in prosecutors’ decisions whether to seek the death penalty. [...]