New Article: ​“Black Deaths Matter: The Race-of-Victim Effect and Capital Punishment”

Why is the death penal­ty pur­sued and imposed in some cas­es and not in oth­ers that, at first glance, seem facial­ly indis­tin­guish­able? Surveying the aca­d­e­m­ic lit­er­a­ture, Daniel Medwed, the University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University School of Law, points to one of the fac­tors that ​“seeps into charg­ing and sen­tenc­ing deci­sions in mean­ing­ful and dis­turb­ing ways“ — race: first, the race of the vic­tim and then the race of the defendant.

In a new arti­cle, Black Deaths Matter: The Race-of-Victim Effect and Capital Punishment, in the Northeastern University School of Law Public Law and Theory Faculty Research Papers Series, Medwed exam­ines the nuances of the race-of-vic­tim effect in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Such an effect has been well-doc­u­ment­edinnumer­ousstud­iesacrossthe United States, and Medwed writes that ​“the race of vic­tim weighs more heav­i­ly in the cap­i­tal cal­cu­lus than that of the defendant.” 

“Decisionmakers all too often place a high­er val­ue on white crime vic­tims than black ones,” he sug­gests. “[T]his ten­den­cy has rip­ple effects that flow through­out the cap­i­tal punishment process.”

The bot­tom line, Medwed explains, is that “[r]egardless of the perpetrator’s race, those who kill whites are more like­ly to face cap­i­tal charges, receive a death sen­tence, and die by exe­cu­tion than those who mur­der blacks.” But the race of the defen­dant mat­ters, too: in same-race mur­ders, white-vic­tim cas­es are more like­ly to pro­duce cap­i­tal charges, but, Medwed says, ​“blacks who kill whites — a rare event — are the most like­ly offend­ers to receive the death penalty.”

Medwed believes the dis­parate treat­ment of death-penal­ty cas­es based upon the race of vic­tim pro­vides a win­dow into broad­er social issues. “[T]he deval­u­a­tion of black lives that lies at the core of [death penal­ty] race-of-vic­tim data is con­sis­tent with larg­er crim­i­no­log­i­cal (and soci­etal) trends,” he says. The way this plays out in the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem, he con­cludes, is fun­da­men­tal­ly unjust because ​“Black lives — and deaths — matter.”