...And this is a surprise to whom, exactly?
Is American justice colorblind? A new study finds that blacks on death row convicted of killing whites are more likely to be executed than whites who kill minorities. It also concludes that blacks who kill other minorities are less likely to be executed than blacks who kill whites. The authors of the report say their findings raise serious doubts about claims that the U.S. criminal justice system is colorblind. Appearing in the August issue of American Sociological Review, the report claims to be the first of its kind to study whether the race of murder victims affects the probability that a convicted killer gets the ultimate punishment. The study examined outcomes of 1,560 people sentenced to death in 16 states between 1972 and 2002...
[...]Eve Conant, Newsweek: So why do you think that blacks are twice as likely to get the death penalty for killing a white than a white for killing a nonwhite?
[David Jacobs, coauthor of the study and a professor of sociology and political science at Ohio State University]: There are two plausible explanations. Prosecutors often win higher office if they win well-publicized cases. When a black kills a white such killings gets more publicity and we have evidence for that. Secondly—and perhaps even more plausible—appellate court justices at the state level are often subject to elections, called retention elections. That means they run unopposed without a party label. It's hard to blow an election like that. But some appellate justices in California and a few other states supposedly granted relief in too many death penalty appeals and got unelected in these retention elections. That's also why some states that are reluctant to execute just stall. California has something like 650 people who've been on death row, and since 1976 but this state has only executed about 15 people. They are dragging it out because they see the pressure and don't want to lose their seats. My fundamental point is that the death penalty is intrinsically political.
CONANT: But also about race; that's what your study found.
JACOBS: Yes, it's both. The findings, in short, show that we clearly value white lives more than those of blacks or Hispanics....
Again, this can't possibly surprise anyone who was, you know, awake and with a functioning brain cell or two. But now it has been confirmed, publicly and statistically. AGAIN.
1930-1967
From 1930, the first year for which statistics are readily available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to 1967, 3,859 persons were executed under civil (that is, nonmilitary) jurisdiction in the United States. During this period of nearly half a century, over half (54%) of those executed were black, 45 percent were white, and the remaning one percent were members of other racial groups -- American Indians (a total of 19 executed from 1930-1967), Filipino (13), Chinese (8), and Japanese (2). The vast majority of those executed were men; 32 women were executed from 1930 to 1967.
Three out of five executions during that period took place in the southern U.S. The state of Georgia had the highest number of executions during the period, totaling 366 -- more than nine percent of the national total. Texas followed with 297 executions; New York with 329; California with 292; and North Caroline with 263. Most executions -- 3,334 of 3,859 -- were for the crime of murder; 455 prisoners (12%) -- ninety percent of them black -- were executed for rape; 70 prisoners were executed for other offenses.
[...] The first execution under the new death penalty laws took place on January 17, 1977, when convicted murdered Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah. Gilmore's was the first execution in the United States since 1967. Two prisoners were executed in 1979; one in 1981; two in 1982; and five in 1983. Executions increased dramatically in 1984, with 21 in that year, and there have been at least 10 executions in the U.S. every year since. There were 74 executions in 1997. From 1977 to 1997, a total of 432 executions took place. Of the executed prisoners during this period, 266 were white, 161 were black, and five were of other races. By the end of 1997, 38 states and the federal government had capital punishment law; 12 states (including Alaska) have no death penalty. (Bureau of Justice Statistics annual bulletins on capital punishment provide current information on U.S. jurisdictions which authorize the death penalty.) By the end of 1996, 3,219 prisoners were under sentence of death, including 3,208 in 34 states and 11 under federal jurisdiction. All were convicted of murder....
Capital Punishment Statistics
U.S. Department of Justice · Office of Justice Programs
Bureau of Justice Statistics
It is, statistically, wildly improbable that blacks commit that many more death-penalty-worthy murders, in proportion, than do whites. 15% of the population, but 40% of the death row inmates? Really not likely.
The question is, now that it's confirmed statistically and publicly (again) that race matters, that who you are and who you kill makes a difference in the penalty you receive, what is going to be done with that information? The problem is that the states with the largest numbers of people on death row, with the possible exception of California, are also those states where you kind of don't expect the officials in charge to ... now what's that word ... oh, yes. Care. Seriously, imagine, if you will, Governor Rick "Goodhair" Perry of Texas being presented with this information. Imagine him deciding that he should act on this, and Texas should stop executing people immediately! ... Bet that broke your mind, didn't it? And imagine the same in Louisiana, with its dreadfully broken justice system currently, or in Oklahoma or Virgina or Ohio or any place else that has a hefty number of people on death row. After all, those people on death row are there because the people of the state demanded it. Show them that the death penalty discriminates with a savage permanence; do you think that the reaction will generally be, "Well, then we should stop." Or do you think the reaction will be, "Well, then, let's just do a little tweak here and there and make it look better, and then keep on hangin' 'em high!" The US Supreme Court will review some of these cases of course, but the current Court is especially likely to get involved in only the most egregious miscarriages of justice, those where you'd have to be blind not to see that something dreadfully wrong happened. (As you will see below, certain state supreme courts are, in fact, just that blind.)
For all that people want this to be the nice, color blind, race blind society that we keep being promised, we aren't there yet. We likely never will be; after all, humans are both intelligent (arguably) and hierarchical, and we keep enslaving the former to the latter. Our primate brain says that somebody has to be on the bottom, after all, and race is an easy marker to use for putting someone there. Above all, people want someone not only to pay for crimes committed, but to be seen paying for those crimes. An execution is both the ultimate payment and the ultimate symbol.
And the state is fond of its symbols, isn't it?
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to review whether race played a role in the selection of an all-white jury that imposed a death sentence on a black man in Louisiana. Allen Snyder was convicted in 1996 of stabbing his estranged wife 15 times and killing a man with whom she was talking.
The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that race had no part in the prosecutor's decisions involving black potential jurors. Dissenting justices said the prosecutor's prejudice was shown by two comparisons he made between Snyder's case and that of O.J. Simpson, who had been acquitted in 1995 of killing his ex-wife and a friend of hers. The U.S. high court had previously ordered the state court to take another look at the case, following a decision overturned a black Texas man's murder conviction and death sentence because prosecutors struck nearly all African-Americans from the jury. The Louisiana court reached the same decision.
The case, which will be argued in the fall, is Snyder v. Louisiana, 06-10119.....
SCOTUSblog: Batson and the "O.J. factor"
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Posted by Lyle Denniston at 04:10 PM
For the second time in two years, the Supreme Court is pondering what to do about this scenario:
A black man is convicted of murder. His trial is before an all-white jury, composed that way in part because prosecutors struck all potential black jurors. In the penalty phase of the trial, the defense counsel seeks to head off a death sentence by discussing "mitigating circumstances." When police arrived at the home of the convicted man some 12 hours after the murder, counsel said, the man "was curled up in a fetal position. He was suicidal. He kept saying 'They're coming to get me. They're coming to get me.'...Doors were being barricaded. The furniture was being used as a barricade...I'll ask you if that is not suggestive of some sort of disturbance" (apparently, meaning mental disturbance).
The prosecutor's rebuttal then includes the following: "...it was 12 hours later when he called [police], huddled up, claiming that he was suicidal, barricaded himself in his house. That made me think of something. Made me think of another case, the most famous murder case in the last, in probably recorded history, that all of you all are aware of..."
At that point, the defense counsel objected. After a bench conference, the prosecutor continued: "The most famous murder case...happened in California very, very, very similar to this case. The perpetrator in that case claimed that he was going to kill himself as he drove in a Ford Bronco and kept the police off of him, and you know what, he got away with it. Ladies and gentlemen, is it outside the realm of possibility that that's not what that man [in this case] was thinking about when he called in and claimed that he was going to kill himself?"
That is what the defense lawyer for Allen Snyder, on death row in Louisiana, has called "the O.J. card," suggesting that it was a calculated maneuver by the prosecutor to use O.J. Simpson's controversial acquittal for murder to get an all-white jury in Louisiana to give Snyder the death penalty.
Now, the Snyder case is back before the Supreme Court, with the prospect that the Court may act on his appeal as early as Monday. The case, Snyder v. Louisiana (06-10119), was considered by the Justices at their Conference on Thursday. It reached the Court in the context of a claim that the jury that convicted Snyder of the stabbing murder of his estranged wife's boyfriend was all-white because prosecutors intended it to be that way, and used their automatic ("peremptory") challenges to achieve that end. Once having such a jury assembled, the appeal argues, a prosecutor -- who had referred before trial to the case as his "O.J. Simpson case" -- knew the jury was open to a racial plea for death.
The jury process, the appeal contends, violated the Supreme Court's 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky, barring the use of race-based peremptory challenges in jury selection. It also asserts that the Louisiana Supreme Court did not follow the Supreme Court's post-Batson decision, Miller-El v. Dretke in 2005, mandating a full analysis of the circumstances of jury selection to detect Batson violations.
But the case also raises, implicitly, the larger question of whether prosecutors' references to the O.J. Simpson case, in trials involving charges against blacks, are a form of jury contamination that puts a vivid emphasis on race in jury selection and in other phases of the trial and sentencing....
