Policy Issues
Race
Racial bias against defendants of color and in favor of white victims has a strong effect on who is capitally prosecuted, sentenced to death, and executed.
Policy Issues
Racial bias against defendants of color and in favor of white victims has a strong effect on who is capitally prosecuted, sentenced to death, and executed.
The Duane Buck Case: Race, Future Dangerousness, and the Death Penalty, with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Christina Swarns
The death penalty has long come under scrutiny for being racially biased. Earlier in the twentieth century when it was applied for the crime of rape, 89 percent of the executions involved black defendants, most for the rape of a white woman. In the modern era, when executions have been carried out exclusively for murder, 75 percent of the cases involve the murder of white victims, even though about half of all homicide victims in America are black.
A bias towards white-victim cases has been found in almost all of the sophisticated studies exploring this area over many years. These studies typically control for other variables in the cases studied, such as the number of victims or the brutality of the crime, and still found that defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death if they killed a white person.
The issue of racial disparities in the use of the death penalty was considered by the Supreme Court in 1987. In a close vote, the Court held that studies alone could not provide the required proof of racial discrimination in a particular defendant’s case. This decision appeared to close the door to broad challenges to the death penalty. However, the Court has found racial discrimination in the selection of the jury in individual capital cases.
Today there is growing evidence that racial bias continues in society, particularly within the criminal justice system. The existence of implicit racial bias among some law enforcement officers, witnesses, jurors, and others allows harsher punishment of minorities, even without legal sanction or intention. Although these prejudices are hard to uproot, the unfair application of the death penalty could be halted by eliminating that sentencing option altogether.
DPIC tracks the race of those on death row, those who have been executed, the victims in the underlying crime, and many related statistics. It collects the sophisticated studies on racial bias that have been published over many years. Many of DPIC’s reports focus on aspects of this question and some are devoted entirely to the issue of race.
Sep 15, 2020
The Death Penalty Information Center has released a major new report on race and the U.S. death penalty, providing an in-depth look at the historical role race has played in the death penalty and detailing the pervasive impact rac…
Read MoreArbitrariness
Aug 15, 2023
Charles Ogletree, Jr., a passionate advocate for racial and criminal justice, died on August 4, 2023, after a long illness. As a tenured professor at Harvard University, Professor Ogletree spoke and wrote often about the death penalty and mentored…
Arbitrariness
Jul 28, 2023
On July 24, 2023, the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Parole set aside all 56 clemency applications filed by nearly every death-sentenced prisoner in Louisiana last month without reviewing the merits of a single one of them. The prisoners asked for…
Innocence
Jul 12, 2023
Doug Evans, the District Attorney who tried death row exoneree Curtis Flowers for murder six times, is retiring. Mr. Flowers received four death sentences, but each conviction was overturned when courts found that Evans had illegally excluded Blac…
Race
Jun 26, 2023
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,
Race
Jun 22, 2023
The Death Penalty Information Center’s new report on race and the death penalty in Tennessee places the state’s death penalty system in historical context, documenting how racial discrimination and racial vio…
Race
Jun 20, 2023
Juneteenth is a celebration and remembrance of the end of slavery in the United States following the Union’s victory in the Civil War. In June 2021, President Joseph Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday, formally c…
Race
Jun 14, 2023
On June 13, 2023, 51 of the 57 people on Louisiana’s death row filed clemency applications with the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, asking Governor John Bel Edwards to commute their sentences to life without parole. …
Juveniles
Jun 13, 2023
In Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, author Alex Mar presents an in-depth account of a violent homicide and its impact on a racially divided community and the individuals involved. Mar not only discusses the f…
Race
Jun 05, 2023
Black-led organizations are opposing legislative efforts in several states to reintroduce or expand use of the death penalty. Lawmakers in Illinois and New Jersey have introduced legislation to reinstate the death penalty, while o…
Arbitrariness
Apr 25, 2023
A forthcoming article in the Denver Law Review discusses two theories of homicide law, the felony murder rule and accomplice liability, that create group liability for the actions of an individual. The