Former President Jimmy Carter spoke recent­ly about the death penal­ty in an inter­view with The Guardian in advance of his appear­ance at the American Bar Association’s sym­po­sium on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Atlanta on November 12. As gov­er­nor of Georgia, Carter signed the revised death penal­ty law that the Supreme Court upheld in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), but he told the paper, ​“In com­plete hon­esty, when I was gov­er­nor I was not near­ly as con­cerned about the unfair­ness of the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty as I am now. I know much more now. I was look­ing at it from a much more parochial point of view – I didn’t see the injus­tice of it as I do now.” He said he is par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned about the arbi­trari­ness of death sen­tences, ​“In America today, if you have a good attor­ney you can avoid the death penal­ty; if you are white you can avoid it; if your vic­tim was a racial minor­i­ty you can avoid it. But if you are very poor or men­tal­ly defi­cient, or the vic­tim is white, that’s the way you get sen­tenced to death.” Carter said the Supreme Court should put a hold on exe­cu­tions and recon­sid­er the death penal­ty: ​“It’s time for the Supreme Court to look at the total­i­ty of the death penal­ty once again. My pref­er­ence would be for the court to rule that it is cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment, which would make it pro­hib­i­tive under the US constitution.”

(E. Pilkington, ​“Jimmy Carter calls for fresh mora­to­ri­um on death penal­ty,” The Guardian, November 11, 2013). See New Voices and Arbitrariness.

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