New Study: Kentucky Death Penalty Racially Biased, Arbitrary, Error Prone

Kentucky​’s death penal­ty is racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry, geo­graph­i­cal­ly arbi­trary, and rid­dled with sys­temic flaws, a new study of the commonwealth’s use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment has found. 

The study, A Statistical Overview of the Kentucky Death Penalty, by University of North Carolina polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Frank R. Baumgartner, exam­ined Kentucky’s use of the death penal­ty from 1975, when its cur­rent sys­tem was imple­ment­ed, to the present. Prof. Baumgartner released his analy­sis of the results on January 11, 2022.

Baumgartner found ​“extra­or­di­nary racial dis­par­i­ties” in Kentucky’s appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment based on the race and sex of both vic­tims and defen­dant that, he said, ​“call into ques­tion the equi­ty of the entire sys­tem.” The dis­par­i­ties reflect­ed a strong white-vic­tim pref­er­ence — and par­tic­u­lar a white-female-vic­tim pref­er­ence — in whether a death sen­tence would be imposed. Death ver­dicts were more than 5 times as like­ly to be imposed in cas­es with white vic­tims than in those with black vic­tims and were 11 times as like­ly in cas­es with white female vic­tims than in those with black male vic­tims. ​“When the offend­er is black and the vic­tim a white female,” the study found, ​“odds are more than 20 times greater for a death sen­tence than in cas­es where both are black.”

Baumgartner also found ​“lit­tle con­nec­tion” between mur­der rates and death sen­tences in Kentucky and sig­nif­i­cant geo­graph­ic dis­par­i­ties in way the death penal­ty was sought and imposed. The sen­tences were also geo­graph­i­cal­ly arbi­trary: a large major­i­ty of Kentucky coun­ties (70.8%) have nev­er imposed the death penal­ty, and only the two coun­ties with the largest Black pop­u­la­tions — Jefferson and Fayette — have imposed more than three death sentences.

The study also exam­ined the out­comes of death-penal­ty cas­es. Baumgartner found, ​“The sin­gle most com­mon out­come of a death sen­tence, affect­ing exact­ly half of those ever sen­tenced to death, is to see a suc­cess­ful appeal of their death sen­tence and the impo­si­tion of a new [non-cap­i­tal] sen­tence.” With 41 of the 82 peo­ple sen­tenced to death since 1975 hav­ing had their sen­tences reversed and just three (3.7%) exe­cu­tions, death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers in Kentucky ​“are near­ly 14 times more like­ly to have their sen­tence reversed than car­ried out,” Baumgartner said. (Click here to enlarge graph­ic.) Thirty death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers are still on death row and eight oth­ers died while on the row. 

Kentucky has not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion since 2008, and ​“no [death] sen­tences have been hand­ed down since 2014, even though over 1,000 homi­cides have occurred in that peri­od,” Baumgartner said. “[W]hat is the point of retain­ing a cost­ly sys­tem that is racial­ly biased, rarely used, and so capriciously applied?”

Russell Allen, the co-direc­tor of orga­niz­ing at the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, stressed the study’s strik­ing find­ings regard­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion. ​“It’s clear that racial dis­par­i­ties fac­tor in in a way that is, of course, detri­men­tal to Black and brown folks,” he said. That is also the com­mon thread between race-of-vic­tim-and-defen­dant dis­par­i­ties and the geo­graph­ic dis­par­i­ties. Jefferson County, home to Louisville, has imposed 19 death sen­tences; Fayette County, home to Lexington, has imposed ten. ​“The only two places that have dou­ble dig­its are places with large Black pop­u­la­tions,” Allen said.

Additional find­ings from the study illus­trate the nation­wide pat­tern of the aging of death row. The aver­age amount of time a pris­on­er spends on Kentucky’s death row has increased every decade. Those whose sen­tences were reversed in the 1980s spent less than ten years on death row, on aver­age; those reversed in the 2010s approached an aver­age of 20 years. At the same time, few­er peo­ple are being added to Kentucky’s death row. As a result, the aver­age age of death-row pris­on­ers has steadi­ly increased. In 1980, the aver­age age of death row was 32. By 2020, it had near­ly dou­bled to 60.3, and no death-row pris­on­ers were younger than 45. 

“If the death penal­ty is sup­posed to be this thing that’s uti­lized to pro­vide swift jus­tice to fam­i­lies, … it’s not being used that way and folks haven’t intend­ed to use it that way in a long time,” Allen said.