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Race

Use of the death penalty has always reflected racial bias: the data show that who is prosecuted, sentenced, and executed depends heavily on race.

In This Section:

80% Four-fifths of those executed and nearly two-thirds of those sentenced to death were convicted of crimes involving white victims.
90% Since Roper v. Simmons (2005), nine out of ten death sentences given to 18 to 20-year-olds in California were imposed on people of color.
100% ​“No matter how the data was analyzed, the race of the victim always emerged as an important factor in who received the death penalty.” 

Dr. Isaac Unah

Overview

Race has always played a powerful role in the American death penalty system. From the earliest uses of capital punishment today, racial bias has continued to create critical gaps in fairness and justice.

Historically there have been significant sentencing disparities in death penalty cases, particularly when considering the race of the victim and the defendant. For many years, rape was a capital crime, and a strong racial bias was evident in these cases. In the first half of the 20th century, nearly 9 in 10 executions were for Black men accused of assaulting white women.

Race of victim patterns persist for all capital crimes. Dozens of in-depth studies over the past 40 years have found a consistent trend: defendants are significantly more likely to face the death penalty if the victim was white, even when controlling for factors such as the severity of the crime or the number of victims. Today, three-quarters of death sentences involve white victims, even though about half of homicide victims in the U.S. are Black.

DPI tracks and analyzes racial data in capital punishment cases, documenting how race influences who is sentenced to death and how the death penalty is applied across the United States. DPI also publishes research, studies, and reports that examine these disparities, both from a historical perspective and within the context of the modern justice system.

Racial Justice Reports Read DPI’s Racial Justice Reports
News Articles Read DPI’s Articles about Race and the Death Penalty
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Relentless Determined Effort: Racial Bias in Jury Selection

The legal system repeatedly failed Curtis Flowers, a Black man wrongfully accused of murdering four people. Mr. Flowers endured six capital prosecutions, each of which featured prosecutorial misconduct, over more than two decades before he was finally released.

Curtis Flowers was prosecuted for capital murder six times by the same prosecutor, Doug Evans. Two trials ended in mistrials, and three convictions were overturned due to serious prosecutorial misconduct. In every trial, DA Evans deliberately and systematically excluded Black jurors. At Mr. Flowers’s first trial, DA Evans removed every Black juror to secure a conviction and death sentence from an all-white jury. By the sixth trial, he had excluded a total of 41 of the 42 qualified Black prospective jurors.

One 2018 study looked at jury selection decisions in 225 trials presided over by DA Evans’ office involving more than 6,700 individuals called for jury service between 1992 and 2017. It found that prosecutors exercised peremptory strikes to exclude African Americans from jury service at nearly 4½ times the rate at which they excluded white jurors.

“The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals strongly suggests…the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few Black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all white jury.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh

The state dropped its prosecution of Mr. Flowers in 2020, after the Supreme Court decision reversed Mr. Flower’s conviction and ordered a new trial.

Mr. Flowers spent nearly 24 years in confinement, most of it in solitary on death row.
  • Colonial Era
  • 1619 – 1865
  • 1865 – 1890s
  • 1890s-1950
  • 2020
  • 1976-Present
Executions and Race in America
Colonial Era
Executions As Tool of Suppression Against Indigenous Peoples

Before the formation of the United States, colonial governments used executions to suppress Indigenous resistance. Native leaders were executed or assassinated for fighting back against land theft and settler expansion. Colonial and early U.S. laws criminalized Indigenous self-defense, often under military law. On December 26, 1862, the U.S. government hanged 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. Ordered by President Abraham Lincoln, it remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history. A total of 392 Dakota prisoners were tried and 303 were sentenced to death, often without due process or legal representation, and some convictions were reached in under five minutes. After reviewing the cases, President Lincoln ​“ordered a careful examination of the records of the trials to be made” and reduced the number of executions to 38. However, these killings were part of a broader campaign to forcibly remove and kill Native people to secure land for white settlers.

Executions and Race in America
1619 – 1865
Executions as a Tool of Enslavement

Capital punishment served as a legal extension of slave discipline. Enslaved Africans were routinely publicly executed and often without trial for rebellion, escape, or simply disobedience. Laws allowed slaveowners to kill enslaved people with impunity.

Executions and Race in America
1865 – 1890s
Executions of Formerly Enslaved Individuals During Reconstruction

After slavery ended, Southern states passed Black Codes: laws designed to criminalize Black existence. Many crimes newly punishable by death were only applied to Black people. These laws and the disproportionate executions of Black people maintained the economic and social control once imposed by slavery.

Executions and Race in America
1890s-1950
Legal Executions During the Jim Crow Era

In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, between 1877 and 1950 over 4,000 Black people were lynched in the U.S., mostly in the South and often by white mobs. In the 1930s, as mob lynchings began to recede in the face of rising criticism, public lynching moved to private state executions. Many Black defendants were executed by the state without fair trials, due process, or adequate defense representation.

Executions and Race in America
2020
Notable Case: Lezmond Mitchell

Lezmond Mitchell​’s execution was the first federal execution of a Native American in the modern era. Mr. Mitchell, a member of the Navajo Nation, was executed in 2020 for a crime committed on tribal land against tribal members. The Navajo Nation strongly opposed his execution, citing traditional beliefs that reject capital punishment. The federal government ignored tribal sovereignty by prosecuting him, mirroring a historical pattern, and President Trump denied all requests for clemency.

Executions and Race in America
1976-Present

Data show an overlap between historic lynchings in former slaveholding states and modern-day executions. States that once relied heavily on racial terror through lynching are disproportionately the same states that carry out executions today.