“[T]he issue of race and the death penal­ty is not unique to the death penal­ty, it’s part of the broad­er prob­lem with the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem,” says Bharat Malkani (pic­tured), author of the 2018 book Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition, in a new Discussions With DPIC pod­cast. In the October 2018 DPIC pod­cast, Malkani — a senior lec­tur­er in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom — speaks with DPIC’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Robert Dunham and Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s Director of Research and Special Projects. They dis­cuss the his­tor­i­cal links between slav­ery, lynch­ing, Jim Crow, and the death penal­ty and the lessons mod­ern oppo­nents of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment can learn from the strate­gies employed by slavery abolitionists.

Malkani explores the par­al­lels between the insti­tu­tion­al approach­es of con­ser­v­a­tive and mod­er­ate anti-slav­ery activists and the argu­ments of mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tives and con­trasts them with the broad moral­i­ty-based argu­ments of rad­i­cal slav­ery abo­li­tion­ists, who, he says ​“fought not just for the abo­li­tion of slav­ery, but for the recog­ni­tion of the dig­ni­ty of black peo­ple and the equal dig­ni­ty of black peo­ple, along­side whites.” The con­ser­v­a­tive and mod­er­ate oppo­nents of slav­ery, he said, ​“focused on slav­ery as a stand­alone social issue,” rather than as ​“a symp­tom of a much broad­er prob­lem with the social order. … And we know in hind­sight that one of the prob­lems with [those] anti-slav­ery voic­es was that it entrenched the prob­lems of racial subjugation.”

Malkani rec­og­nizes that prag­mat­ic argu­ments based upon inno­cence, the costs of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and sys­temic fail­ures in the way cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is admin­is­tered have a role to play in efforts to end the death penal­ty, but argues that ​“in the longer term, the moral­i­ty-based argu­ments, based on a recog­ni­tion of dig­ni­ty, will have a greater social impact.” History teach­es ​“that we can­not think of the death penal­ty as sep­a­rate [from] America’s his­to­ry of slav­ery and racial vio­lence,” he says. Death-penal­ty abo­li­tion­ists, he says, must keep ​“the big­ger, longer-term pic­ture” in mind. ​“The issue here is not just the prob­lems with the death penal­ty in prac­tice, but the under­ly­ing val­ues that lend sup­port for the death penal­ty. … If we do not tack­le the val­ues that under­pin the prob­lem and ques­tion the val­ues that under­pin the death penal­ty, then we’re just going to entrench the prob­lems that lead to the death penalty.”

(Posted by DPIC, October 25, 2018.) Listen to the Discussions With DPIC pod­cast, Professor Bharat Malkani Explores the Relationship Between Slavery and Slavery-Abolition Strategies and the Modern U.S. Death Penalty, here. See Podcasts and Race.

Citation Guide