New DPIC Podcast Discusses ​‘Racist Roots’ and ​‘Enduring Injustice’ of U.S. Death Penalty

In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pic­tured, left), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue (pic­tured, below), Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a dis­cus­sion of their orga­ni­za­tions’ recent reports on race and the death penal­ty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. Less than a month lat­er, CDPL released its own report, Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty. Though the styles of the two reports are very dif­fer­ent, both address the his­tor­i­cal ties between the death penal­ty and white suprema­cy, slav­ery, lynch­ings, and Jim Crow.

Engel describes the Racist Roots project, which was inspired by the 1619 Project at the New York Times. CDPL col­lab­o­rat­ed with his­to­ri­ans, civ­il rights groups, lawyers, and artists to pro­duce a com­pi­la­tion of works on ​“the his­to­ry of the death penalty’s entan­gle­ment with race in this coun­try.” She shares some of the through­lines that were illu­mi­nat­ed by the project, includ­ing the use of ani­mal imagery to dehu­man­ize Black defen­dants: ​“that was used in head­lines in the 1920s, and was used in clos­ing argu­ments in the 1990s, or even in hor­rif­ic post­ings to a local news­pa­per, regard­ing the cap­i­tal tri­al of Andrew Ramseur in 2010, when peo­ple were sug­gest­ing that that mon­key be hung from the near­est street­light, as a mes­sage to ​‘them.’”

Both reports exam­ined visu­al sym­bols to high­light themes of race. Ndulue describes one strik­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion from Enduring Injustice, say­ing, ​“one of the real­ly pow­er­ful pieces for us … was a pic­ture of a pub­lic hang­ing, the last pub­lic hang­ing in Kentucky, and how sim­i­lar it looked to the pic­ture of a lynch­ing. And that was lynch­ing in Paris, Texas … where the words ​‘jus­tice’ are on the gal­lows where the lynch­ing occurred, giv­ing it kind of this aura of accept­abil­i­ty, of its offi­cial sta­tus. But real­ly, oth­er than that word, ​‘jus­tice,’ when you look side by side … that lynch­ing which is sup­pos­ed­ly, this extrale­gal, vig­i­lante, not a true part of our jus­tice sys­tem, vio­lence is iden­ti­cal to what was sup­port­ed, is sup­posed to be civ­i­lized, accept­ed as part of our justice system.” 

The dis­cus­sion also links the death penal­ty to broad­er soci­etal con­ver­sa­tions about racial jus­tice. In Racist Roots, CDPL founder Henderson Hill writes, ​“When we open our eyes to the his­to­ry of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, the con­clu­sion becomes inescapable. The death penal­ty is just one more Confederate mon­u­ment that we must tear down.” Ndulue draws the con­nec­tion between that metaphor and the very lit­er­al Confederate mon­u­ments, like one out­side the cour­t­house in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, a coun­ty that rep­re­sent­ed just 5% of the state’s pop­u­la­tion but pro­duced one-third of the state’s death sen­tences between 2010 and 2015. Caddo Parish had a pat­tern of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, espe­cial­ly the removal of Black cit­i­zens from juries, which was linked to its overuse of capital punishment. 

Engel explains how the death penal­ty has con­tributed to mass incar­cer­a­tion by encour­ag­ing defen­dants to take plea deals for long sen­tences, in order to avoid the death penal­ty, and by fram­ing life with­out parole as an alter­na­tive when juries want an assur­ance that a defen­dant will nev­er be released. She describes the death penal­ty as ​“the apex of our sys­tem, and … the apex of the racism in the system.” 

Ndulue says that the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, ​“crys­tal­lized for me the impor­tance of telling the sto­ries of a coun­try and a legal sys­tem in which we have come to kind of accept this parade of vio­lence and death.… Completing this report and issu­ing it this fall was real­ly impor­tant, not just for being able to pro­vide some con­text while the nation is con­sid­er­ing this issue, but it was also impor­tant to broad­en the under­stand­ing of the prob­lems with the death penal­ty and con­tin­ued racial bias beyond kind of just the sta­tis­tics of the dis­parate impact and the disproportionate use.”