In a recent article in Slate, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, the executive director of the university’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says “the death penalty is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption and cruelty.” He emphasizes the increasing isolation of capital punishment to a few outlier jurisdictions, particularly highlighting Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Caddo Parish received national attention when, shortly after the exoneration of Glenn Ford, who was wrongfully convicted and spent 30 years on death row, District Attorney Dale Cox said the state should “kill more people.” Ogletree described the legacy of racial violence and intimidation in the parish, including that Caddo Parish, which has been responsible for 8 of Louisiana’s 12 death sentences since 2010, was “the site of more lynchings of black men than all but one other county In America.” Until 2011, a Confederate flag flew atop a monument to the Confederacy outside the entrance to the parish courthouse in Shreveport where jurors reported for duty. In 2015, a study (click image to enlarge) found that Caddo prosecutors struck prospective black jurors at triple the rate of other jurors. Ogletree spotlighted a number of questionable death sentences imposed on Caddo defendants who may have been innocent and framed, were intellectually disabled or mentally ill teenagers, or who suffered from serious brain damage and mental illness, and who were provided systemically deficient representation. “Caddo offers us a microcosm of what remains of the death penalty in America today,” Ogletree says. 33 jurisdictions have abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in more than 9 years. Just six states performed executions in 2015, and three-quarters of the people who were executed last year raised serious questions about mental health or innocence. Death sentences were at a record low (49), and 14, he said, came from two states — Alabama and Florida — that allow non-unanimous jury recommendations of death. Ogletree concludes, “The death penalty in America today is the death penalty of Caddo Parish — a cruel relic of a bygone and more barbarous era. We don’t need it, and I welcome its demise.”
(C. Ogletree, “The Death Penalty’s Last Stand,” Slate, January 6, 2016.) See Arbitrariness, Race, and DPIC’s 2015 Year End Report.
