Professor Ray Paternoster of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland was the senior author of a 2003 state-com­mis­sioned review of the role that race and geog­ra­phy play in Maryland’s death penal­ty prac­tice. He recent­ly wrote about the study’s find­ings in the Baltimore Sun:

I head­ed the Maryland research team that stud­ied the fair­ness of the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty in the state. We con­clud­ed that race and geog­ra­phy were fac­tors in the deci­sions that lead to death row. Put anoth­er way, whom you kill and where in Maryland you com­mit the crime make a dif­fer­ence.

We con­clud­ed this by sift­ing data on all 1,311 cas­es between 1978 and 1999 in which pros­e­cu­tors could have pur­sued a death sen­tence. The ques­tion was not just who end­ed up on death row but who did not and what dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed these two groups.
…
After tak­ing all these oth­er fac­tors into account, we found evi­dence that race mat­tered. We found even stronger evi­dence that the par­tic­u­lar juris­dic­tion where the crime occurred mat­tered.
…

We found that both the race of the vic­tim and, to a less­er extent, the race of the offend­er, make a difference:

  • Those who killed a white vic­tim in Maryland were between two and three times more like­ly to be sen­tenced to death than those who killed a non-white.

  • Black offend­ers who killed white vic­tims were near­ly 2 1/​2 times more like­ly to be sen­tenced to death than white offend­ers who killed white vic­tims and near­ly 3 1/​2 times more like­ly to be sen­tenced to death than black offend­ers who killed black vic­tims.

    We found that these racial dif­fer­ences showed up ear­ly in the process, well before the case ever reached a court­room, in the deci­sions made by the state’s attor­neys on whether to seek a death sen­tence. Further, these pat­terns held regard­less of juris­dic­tion.
    …
    Whatever the rea­son, the data are clear and the rela­tion­ships strong: the 21-year record of cap­i­tal homi­cide pros­e­cu­tions sug­gests that race and geog­ra­phy do play a role in pros­e­cu­tors’ deci­sions to pur­sue a death sen­tence in the state of Maryland.
    …
    We con­sid­er these find­ings dis­turb­ing. Maryland law spells out a series of aggra­vat­ing and mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors that alone are sup­posed to deter­mine whether a con­vict­ed mur­der­er gets a death sen­tence or life in prison. But our study indi­cat­ed that race and juris­dic­tion also play a role, affect­ing cas­es long before juries ever get to vote — when pros­e­cu­tors decide whether to pur­sue a death sentence.

(“Misunderstandings Cloud Death Penatly Findings,” Baltimore Sun, Dec. 20, 2005). See also Race.

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