According to a study by the Women Donors Network, 95% of elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors in the U.S. are white and 79% are white men. An analy­sis by DPIC of the study’s data fur­ther shows that, in states that have the death penal­ty, 94.5% of elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors are white. In 9 death penal­ty states (Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington, and Wyoming), 100% of elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors are white. These num­bers reveal that there has been lit­tle change from the time of a 1998 study that found that 97.5% of District Attorneys in death penal­ty states were white. Prosecutors wield sig­nif­i­cant pow­er in crim­i­nal cas­es, mak­ing deci­sions about whether to accept plea deals and whether or not to seek the death penal­ty in cap­i­tal mur­der cas­es. This dis­cre­tion can be a source of racial dis­par­i­ties in sen­tenc­ing. ​“What this shows us is that, in the con­text of a grow­ing cri­sis that we all rec­og­nize in crim­i­nal jus­tice in this coun­try, we have a sys­tem where incred­i­ble pow­er and dis­cre­tion is con­cen­trat­ed in the hands of one demo­graph­ic group,” said Brenda Choresi Carter of the Women Donors Network. Bryan Stevenson, direc­tor of the Equal Justice Initiative, said, ​“I think most peo­ple know that we’ve had a sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem with lack of diver­si­ty in deci­sion-mak­ing roles in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem for a long time. I think what these num­bers dra­ma­tize is that the real­i­ty is much worse than most peo­ple imag­ine and that we are mak­ing almost no progress.” (Click image to enlarge)

(N. Fandos, ​“A Study Documents the Paucity of Black Elected Prosecutors: Zero in Most States,” The New York Times, July 7, 2015; ​“Justice for All?,” Women Donors Network, July 2015.) See Race and Arbitrariness.

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