A new book, Race, Rape, and Injustice: Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era, recounts the fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry of twen­ty-eight law stu­dents who trav­eled through­out the South in the 1960s to gath­er data about the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in rape cas­es. They found the death penal­ty was used almost exclu­sive­ly against black defen­dants accused of rap­ing white women. The book was large­ly writ­ten by Barrett Foerster, one of the stu­dents, and then com­plet­ed after his death by Michael Meltsner, an attor­ney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at the time of the study. The results of the inves­ti­ga­tion were used in argu­ments before the U.S. Supreme Court and played a role in Furman v. Georgia, the land­mark case that held the death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in 1972. In the con­clud­ing chap­ter, Foerster wrote, ​“Racism does not dis­ap­pear just because laws and legal pro­ce­dures are changed. Capital pun­ish­ment, though less pop­u­lar, less wide­spread, and less cit­ed as a cure for crime, is still with us. And with the exon­er­a­tion of many inno­cent pris­on­ers, its flaws are now even more obvi­ous than before.”

(B. Foerster, ​“Race, Rape, and Injustice: Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era,” (edit. by M. Meltsner) University of Tennessee Press, 2012; DPIC post­ed Nov. 19, 2012). See Race and Books about the death penalty.

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