New DPIC Podcast: DPIC’s New Report on the Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty

In the June 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Managing Director Anne Holsinger and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring dis­cuss the lat­est Racial Justice Storytelling Report, Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty. The report exam­ines the his­to­ry of Tennessee’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem, doc­u­ment­ing the con­tin­ued impact of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and racial vio­lence on the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. Ms. Herring, the author, pro­vides an overview of the report, explores key find­ings, explains its rela­tion­ship to DPIC’s ear­li­er work, and iden­ti­fies sim­i­lar and unique trends in Tennessee. 

This time­ly report comes after Tennessee sus­pend­ed exe­cu­tions amidst seri­ous flaws in their exe­cu­tion pro­to­col and as recent leg­isla­tive efforts seek to expand exe­cu­tion meth­ods. A state­ment by Tennessee State Representative Paul Sherrell ear­li­er this year to include hang­ing by a tree as an exe­cu­tion method ​“indi­cates that there’s a lack of under­stand­ing about the his­to­ry of the death penal­ty in Tennessee, and the racial dynam­ics of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as well,” said Ms. Herring. 

Like Oklahoma, the report iden­ti­fied pat­terns of geo­graph­ic arbi­trari­ness and dis­pro­por­tion­ate death sen­tences for white-vic­tim cas­es in Tennessee. Ms. Herring not­ed that ​“Preferential valu­ing of white vic­tims in the death penal­ty is very rem­i­nis­cent of the lynch­ing days, where peo­ple who were accused of harm­ing white vic­tims in par­tic­u­lar were more like­ly to be on the receiv­ing end of some form of lethal pun­ish­ment.” Tennessee has a long his­to­ry of racial ter­ror groups and vig­i­lante jus­tice, with groups like the KKK orig­i­nat­ing in the state. 

Ms. Herring hopes that leg­is­la­tors and pol­i­cy­mak­ers will under­stand that ​“the past real­ly isn’t the past… The lega­cies of racial ter­ror will con­tin­ue to inform the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment if we don’t acknowl­edge where cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment comes from in this state…We can use his­to­ry to inform how we’re going to move forward.” 

You can lis­ten to the pod­cast here.