A sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­ti­cal study of homi­cide cas­es in South Carolina by Professor Isaac Unah of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and attor­ney Michael Songer found that pros­e­cu­tors were more like­ly to seek the death penal­ty when the vic­tim in the under­ly­ing mur­der was white, if the vic­tim was female, and when the crime occurred in a rur­al area of the state.

The authors first exam­ined the raw data of homi­cide cas­es in South Carolina over a 5‑year peri­od and noted:

During the 1993 to 1997 peri­od, 2319 non-neg­li­gent homi­cides with known defen­dants were report­ed in South Carolina. Out of these 2319, we iden­ti­fied 130 cas­es, or 5.6%, in which pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty.
…
South Carolina pros­e­cu­tors processed 865 mur­der cas­es with White vic­tims and sought the death penal­ty in 7.6% of them. By con­trast, pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty in only 1.3% of the 1614 mur­der cas­es involv­ing Black victims.…The data fur­ther sug­gest that non-Whites are far more like­ly than Whites to be homi­cide vic­tims in the state. About 62% of homi­cide vic­tims in the study were non-Whites; vir­tu­al­ly all of these vic­tims were African American.
…
Despite the high num­ber of Black homi­cide vic­tims, South Carolina solic­i­tors sought the death penal­ty in only 1.2% of cas­es in which Black vic­tims were mur­dered by Black offend­ers. This data indi­cates that Black vic­tim dis­count­ing was prac­ticed in South Carolina dur­ing the peri­od we inves­ti­gate. Black vic­tim dis­count­ing describes the sit­u­a­tion where­by the lives of Black vic­tims are dis­count­ed in val­ue through the lenien­cy shown their accused mur­der­ers. By con­trast, pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty in 9.7% of cas­es in which a Black defen­dant killed a White vic­tim and 6.7% of White on White mur­ders.
…
South Carolina pros­e­cu­tors were 5.8 times as like­ly to seek the death penal­ty against sus­pect­ed killers of Whites as against sus­pect­ed killers of Blacks.
…
As we sus­pect­ed, pros­e­cu­tors seek the death penal­ty with greater fre­quen­cy in cas­es involv­ing male defen­dants and female vic­tims. Female defen­dants com­mit­ted 12.1% of the homi­cides in our dataset. However, female defen­dants account for only 4.8% of death penal­ty cas­es. Similarly, 24.6% of mur­ders involve at least one female vic­tim, but these cas­es com­prise over 47% of capital prosecutions.


The researchers then sub­ject­ed the raw num­bers to an analy­sis that accounts for the fac­tors that make one case more heinous, or death-wor­thy, than anoth­er. They then concluded:

[T]he analy­sis indi­cates an odds mul­ti­pli­er of 3.10 for White vic­tim cas­es. That is, South Carolina solic­i­tors are three times as like­ly to seek the death penal­ty against killers of Whites as against killers of African Americans.

With respect to geo­graph­i­cal arbi­trari­ness, they relat­ed a par­tic­u­lar exam­ple that demon­strates the freak­ish nature of the death penalty:

In 1984, Raymond Patterson fatal­ly shot an elder­ly man in the park­ing lot of a
South Carolina motel. The line divid­ing District 11 and District 5 runs through the
park­ing lot. Authorities even­tu­al­ly deter­mined that Patterson was sev­er­al feet with­in
District 11 at the moment of the shoot­ing, and he was even­tu­al­ly sen­tenced to death.
District 5, which has sent only one per­son to death row in the past 10 years,146 has a death
seek rate of only 3.8%. By con­trast, District 11 has sent 12 peo­ple to death row dur­ing
the same peri­od and has a death seek rate of 13.2%. If Patterson had com­mit­ted his
crime only three or four park­ing spaces away, he almost cer­tain­ly would not have
received the death penal­ty. Patterson’s case epit­o­mizes the freak­ish nature of cap­i­tal
pun­ish­ment that led Justice Stewart to declare in Furman v. Georgia that cap­i­tal
pun­ish­ment “[i]s cru­el and unusu­al in the same way that being struck by light­ning is cru­el
and unusu­al.” (cita­tion omitted).

They also concluded:

Legally imper­mis­si­ble vic­tim and defen­dant char­ac­ter­is­tics also affect cap­i­tal case
selec­tion. Defendants accused of killing strangers are six times as like­ly to face cap­i­tal
pros­e­cu­tions as offend­ers who kill friends or fam­i­ly mem­bers in an iden­ti­cal man­ner.
Cases involv­ing female vic­tims are 2.5 times as like­ly to result in cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tions as
cas­es with male vic­tims. Perhaps most dis­tress­ing­ly, the study con­firms that insid­i­ous
racial dis­par­i­ties still haunt South Carolina’s death penal­ty sys­tem. South Carolina
pros­e­cu­tors are three times more like­ly to seek the death penal­ty in White vic­tim cas­es
than in Black vic­tim cas­es. All of these results are sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant at or beyond
con­ven­tion­al significance levels.

(M. Songer and I. Unah, ​“The Effect of Race, Gender, and Location on Prosecutorial Decision to Seek the Death Penalty in South Carolina,” 58 S. Carolina Law Rev. _​_​_​(Nov. 2006)) (empha­sis added) (Prof. Unah is also cur­rent­ly the Director of the Law and Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation). 

See Race, Arbitrariness, and Studies.

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