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 blacks and whites are about equally likely to be victims of murder.
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 MoreRace
Jan 20, 2023
A Kansas capital defendant is challenging the prosecution’s decision to pursue the death penalty in his case, invoking a heightened standard of review the Kansas constitution applies to infringements of fundamental rights.
Human Rights
Jan 06, 2023
Longtime civil and human rights lawyer, Diann Rust-Tierney, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Racial Justice Institute, joins Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham in the first DPIC podcast of 2023 for a…
Arbitrariness
Jan 03, 2023
A Dallas County judge has recommended that the conviction and death sentence of a Jewish death-row prisoner be overturned because his trial was poisoned by the virulent anti-Semitic bigotry of the Texas judge who …
Mental Illness
Nov 29, 2022
Texas is planning to execute a seriously mentally ill prisoner who has gouged out both of his eyes because of his paranoid schizophrenia. On November 7, 2022, the District Court of Grayson County, Texas set an April 5, 2023 execution date for
Race
Nov 28, 2022
Despite a court-appointed special prosecutor’s request to vacate his death sentence, Missouri executed death-row prisoner Kevin Johnson (pictured, with daughter Khorry Ramey, left, and newborn grandson) on Novembe…
Human Rights
Nov 10, 2022
The Death Penalty Information Center, supported by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, launched a new project on Human Rights and the U.S. Death Penalty on November 4, 2022, with a live…
Race
Nov 01, 2022
In the October 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss DPIC’s 2022 report
Innocence
Oct 28, 2022
Two-thirds of Black women and more than half of Black men have been struck from jury service in Duval County death penalty cases, more than double the rate at which white prospective jurors are excluded, a study of capital jury se…
Race
Oct 25, 2022
When California’s Racial Justice Act becomes applicable to the cases of prisoners on the state’s death row beginning in January 2023, it will vastly reshape the legal landscape of the state’s death penalty, legal …
Race
Oct 20, 2022
The process of death qualification, which excludes people who oppose the death penalty from serving on capital juries, is racially discriminatory, civil rights advocate Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II wrote in an October 10, 2022 op-ed. …