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 MoreJan 18, 2021
An historically aberrant six-month federal execution spree came to a close after midnight on January 16, 2021 when an African-American man who was scheduled to die on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was put to death…
Jan 18, 2021
On Martin Luther King Day, DPIC looks at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s views on capital punishment. In a November 1957 article in Ebony, Dr. King was asked “Do you think God approves the death penalty for crimes like rape…
Jan 15, 2021
Legislators in the Virginia House and Senate are poised to attempt a repeal of its capital punishment statute, as Governor Ralph Northam (pictured) announced that he would sponsor a bill to end the commonwealth’s …
Jan 12, 2021
Eddie Lee Howard, Jr., convicted and sentenced to death based on the false forensic testimony of a since disgraced prosecution expert witness, has been exonerated after nearly 26 years on Mississippi’s death row. …
Jan 07, 2021
Calling the death penalty “ineffective, racially based, hypocritical and inhumane,” St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell (pictured) has renewed his pledge to never authorize a capital prosecution. In a December 23, 20…
Dec 08, 2020
As the December 10, 2020 execution date of federal death-row prisoner Brandon Bernard (pictured with his family) approached, jurors and a former prosecutor in his case came forward saying that the teen offender’s life should be sp…
Dec 07, 2020
NEWS (12/4/20) — Nevada: The Nevada Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence imposed on Mexican foreign national Carlos Gutierrez
Dec 04, 2020
Defendants of color and foreign nationals who are intellectually disabled are disproportionately likely to be sentenced to death, a Death Penalty Information Center analysis of cases involving intellectually disabled defendants suggests. …
Nov 25, 2020
In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pictured, left), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue (pictured, below), Senior Director of Research a…
Nov 17, 2020
Lawyers for federal death-row prisoner Orlando Hall (pictured), who is scheduled to be executed on November 19, 2020, have filed a motion to stay his execution based upon evidence that his death sentence was a product of pervasive…