DPIC Releases New Report on How the History of Racial Violence and Discrimination Have Shaped the Death Penalty in Tennessee

The Death Penalty Information Center’s new report on race and the death penal­ty in Tennessee places the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem in his­tor­i­cal con­text, doc­u­ment­ing how racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and racial vio­lence con­tin­ue to influ­ence the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty, released June 22, 2023, notes that as the Tennessee Department of Correction devel­ops new lethal injec­tion pro­to­cols and pre­pares to resume exe­cu­tions, the state may find it use­ful to under­stand how Tennessee arrived at its cur­rent cap­i­tal punishment system.

The report explains that in the 18^th and 19^th cen­turies, the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Tennessee was large­ly depen­dent on the race of the defen­dant. There were 13 offens­es for which Black peo­ple could receive the death penal­ty, com­pared to just two offens­es that could result in death sen­tences for white cit­i­zens. From the begin­ning, the death penal­ty was applied dif­fer­ent­ly based on race. 

The death penal­ty was not the only form of lethal pun­ish­ment that tar­get­ed Black Tennesseans. The report ties Tennessee’s use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to its trou­bled his­to­ry of racial ter­ror. Tennessee was the site of more than 500 lynch­ings, accord­ing to Tennesseans for Historical Justice, and a nation­wide study of death sen­tences between 1989 and 2017 found a sig­nif­i­cant sta­tis­ti­cal rela­tion­ship between a state’s his­to­ry of lynch­ing and the num­ber of death sen­tences giv­en to Black defendants. 

Many of the his­tor­i­cal issues relat­ed to race in the state, includ­ing seg­re­ga­tion and Black vot­er dis­en­fran­chise­ment, are still preva­lent in Tennessee today. For exam­ple, the state has the high­est pro­por­tion of dis­en­fran­chised Black res­i­dents in the United States, with more than 1 in 5 Black peo­ple unable to vote. Concerns regard­ing vot­er dis­en­fran­chise­ment have been height­ened as the state leg­is­la­ture has con­tin­ued to remove pow­er from local­ly elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors to han­dle var­i­ous aspects of cap­i­tal cas­es, and shift­ed the author­i­ty to the state’s Attorney General, who is not elected. 

“Nothing can change the fact that racial vio­lence and dis­crim­i­na­tion are part of Tennessee’s his­to­ry. But study­ing the past can help us under­stand why racial dis­par­i­ties con­tin­ue today— espe­cial­ly in our death penal­ty sys­tem — and inform future deci­sions,” said Robin Maher, DPIC’s Executive Director.