BOOKS: ​“Race and the Death Penalty: The Legacy of McCleskey v. Kemp”

In a land­mark rul­ing in McCleskey v. Kemp in 1987, a bit­ter­ly divid­ed U.S. Supreme Court vot­ed 5 – 4 vote that sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty was insuf­fi­cient to over­turn an indi­vid­ual death sen­tence. A new book, Race and the Death Penalty: The Legacy of McCleskey v. Kemp, edit­ed by David P. Keys, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of crim­i­nal jus­tice at New Mexico State University and R.J. Maratea of the Youth Research and Resource Center, Inc. explores the last­ing effects of the McCleskey rul­ing. Race and the Death Penalty con­tains 12 chap­ters by death penal­ty experts, each dis­cussing a dif­fer­ent aspect of race in the post-McCleskey death penal­ty sys­tem, includ­ing research on the racial dis­par­i­ties in cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing that per­sist today. In a review, Scott William Bowman, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas State University, said the book ​“does a mar­velous job of bal­anc­ing the his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary nar­ra­tives of how race and racism inter­act with the ongo­ing appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty.… Keys and Maratea have reju­ve­nat­ed the dialogue.”

(D. P. Keys and R. J. Maratea, edi­tors, ​“Race and the Death Penalty: The Legacy of McClesky v. Kemp,” Lynne Rienner, 2016.) See Books and Race.