Transcript
Anne Holsinger 00:01
Hello, and welcome to 1201, The Death Penalty in Context. I’m Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Our guests today are Furonda Brasfield, Director of Leadership Development for the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and Taylor Bonner, the Death Penalty Information Center’s Racial Justice Storyteller. Ms. Brasfield is a licensed attorney based in Arkansas who formerly served as the executive director of the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and has worked extensively with a variety of grassroots organizations. Ms. Bonner joined DPI in October 2025 to tell the history of the death penalty through the lens of racial justice, working to highlight the disproportionate impact of the death penalty on communities of color. Thank you both for joining us today.
Furonda Brasfield 00:46
Thank you so much for having me on, Anne. It’s a pleasure to have this discussion with you today.
Taylor Bonner 00:52
Thank you, Anne, for inviting me on today. And also, it’s an honor to be speaking with Furonda.
Anne Holsinger 00:59
This February marks the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, which began as “Negro History Week” in 1926, founded by historian Carter G. Woodson. Today’s conversation honors its centennial by examining the intersection of race and the death penalty, both its historical legacy and its ongoing impact. Furonda, as we recognize Black History Month, can you talk about the historical roots of the death penalty’s disproportionate impact on Black people?
Furonda Brasfield 01:25
Absolutely. The death penalty has disproportionately affected African Americans. Every fact and figure says the same thing. And we know that the history of the death penalty is rooted in racial terror lynching that disproportionately and overwhelmingly affected Black people in America. But I want to be clear about this in these atrocities that this this is not black history. This is the history of white supremacy and how it has impacted Black Americans. If we look back to racial terror lynching, what we would see is the terroristic taking of Black life without due process, without any types of safety or controls for Black bodies. The death penalty or lynching was actually replaced with the death penalty because lynching didn’t look good. It was bad for business. And so many municipalities said that they could take over this lynching practice and they sanitized it with the modern-day death penalty. Now, as we look at the data and Taylor can probably speak much better to the data. But now that we look at the data, we can see that African Americans are much more likely to receive the death penalty for a capital crime versus their white counterparts. And if there is a white victim, then it is overwhelmingly so, that the death penalty is much more likely. So, when we look at the matter of race in America, life and death could be dependent on what color you are.
Anne Holsinger 03:38
Thank you. And I appreciate you clarifying. You know, Black History Month is about celebrating Black history. And of course, the topics that we’re covering today are are difficult and like you said, they trace more to the history of white supremacy than to the triumph of African Americans. So, I appreciate that clarification. Taylor, what historical data or cases do you think are essential for understanding the death penalty’s racial legacy?
Taylor Bonner 04:07
Furonda, thank you for laying the groundwork on this issue and highlighting the racial terror lynching and the white supremacy, and also mentioning the disparities. And I definitely plan to get into those disparities. But the historical data and cases, I think, are essential. If we’re talking about the racial legacy of the death penalty, I think it’s essential to start with Strauder v. West Virginia. For some historical context, in 1880, Taylor Strauder, a formerly enslaved Black man, was convicted of murder in Ohio County, West Virginia, and sentenced to death by public hanging. He was tried by an all-white jury because, at that time, state law explicitly limited jury service to white males. And even before his sentence was imposed, Strauder said, on the record, ‘I don’t think I’ve had a fair trial.’His attorneys had objected to the jury panel asking that it should be quashed and that a new one be selected through a process that did not exclude Black citizens. So those requests were denied, but on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled seven to two in his favor, holding that laws barring Black citizens from jury service violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. So, I say that because that decision established something critical. The Constitution does not permit the systemic exclusion of black jurors. So,although that’s powerful, it’s also troubling because more than a century later, the courts are still grappling with this same issue in a court case named Batson v. Kentucky. So that’s in 1986. The Supreme Court confronted racial discrimination in jury selection, still. So,the court held that prosecutors cannot use peremptory strikes to automatically remove potential jurors because of their race. It made clear that the Equal Protection Clause guarantees a defendant that the state will not exclude members of his race from the jury based on racial assumptions. But, even nearly 40 years after Batson, this issue remains alive in capital cases. So just last year in Mississippi, death sentence defendant Terry Pitchford had raised a Batson claim. In his case, just to lay the groundwork of numbers and what we’retalking about in demographics, 126 people were summoned for the potential jury. 40 identified as African American, 84 identified as white, one identified as Hispanic and another identified as an unidentified race. So, after rounds of dismissals, only five Black juries remained compared to 36 white jurors. Then the prosecutor used peremptory strikes to remove four of those five remaining Black jurors. So, when we talk about the racial legacy of the death penalty, we’re not just discussing distant history. So, from Strauder toBatson to capital defendants raising the same claims today, the question of race and who sits on the jury in the death penalty has been contested for nearly 150 years.
Anne Holsinger 07:35
Thank you, Taylor. Furonda, can you tell us about your work with the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty and what it means to take a racial justice approach to death penalty abolition?
Furonda Brasfield 07:46
Absolutely. My work with the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty is multifaceted. I am the Director of Leadership Development, and so I work with leaders across the country in support of their work. I work on political education. I help to recruit, retain, support,leaders in our movement. I work with a group called the Leaders of Color in the Death Penalty Movement to support that work, because what we do know is that even in our death penalty movement, we are siloed. The death penalty is not as broad as some of the other criminal justice issues, and so we are a siloed issue and leaders of color that are doing this work are few and growing, but the number is small, relatively in comparison to all of our leaders in the movement. And so leaders of color find themselves as a silo within a silo. So, I work to support them as well. And I also work with the Noose to Needle campaign, which is a campaign designed to show the racist legacy of the death penalty and how the death penalty is a remnant of slavery and racial terror lynching. Also, we know that executions are and have historically been a tool of suppression against indigenous people as well. Creating those historical through lines so that we can more clearly understand what’s happening now is a part of what we do with the Noose to Needle campaign. And so, these racial justice themes are themes that have not been explored extensively, but they’re very, very important because if we have a practice, and we do have a practice, in the United States that almost targets African Americans and treats African Americans much more harshly than other groups for this ultimate penalty of death, then we need to explore that. We need the data around that. And we need to be able to educate not only vulnerable populations, but the populations at large about this atrocity and this race-based atrocity that’s happening within our United States capital punishment system. And so, it’s really, really important to understand the racial aspect of the death penalty in America and how the death penalty is applied, and then to create policies that would prevent people from being more likely to receive a death penalty because of the color of their skin.
Anne Holsinger 11:00
Taylor, how do you use data to tell stories about racial injustice and the death penalty? And what are some of the most striking statistics you think the public should know?
Taylor Bonner 11:09
Thanks, Anne. When I use data to talk about race and the death penalty, I’m not using numbers to overwhelm people. I’m using them to clarify what the lived reality has been. The reality is this: race has a measurable, statistically significant impact at nearly every stage of the capital punishment system. Some really alarming data. I’ll share, for example, researchers William Bowers and Marla Sandies found that the presence of at least one Black male juror on a capital jury reduced the likelihood of a death sentence by nearly 30%. So,this tells us something really profound, that who sits on the jury can literally mean the difference between life and death. Additionally, our data from DPI researched along with political science professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Frank Baumgartner, shows another striking disparity. Looking at death sentences imposed nationwide since 1972, only about 2% were imposed on white defendants when the victim was Black. So, in other words, cases involving white defendants and Black victims nearly ever result in death sentences, even though the reverse scenario has historically been far more likely to lead to capital punishment. And then there’s this really well-knownresearch study conducted by Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, who found something even more troubling. In capital cases involving white victims, defendants whose features were perceived as more stereotypically Black were more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death. So, the number they found was 57.5% compared to those perceived as less stereotypically Black. Analyzing and looking at that data, that means perception, not just race, but how how, quote unquote Black someone looks can influence whether a person lives or die. So that’s just something, to me, what I think makes us Black folks look beautiful, what makes us unique, really determines our lives.
Furonda Brasfied 13:36
And Taylor, Taylor, I’ve got to butt-in because I really appreciate the data and having that data available to say what we know is happening and what we know is going on, but being able to pull the data and put the data with the stories. That’s one of the reasons that we, you know, we say that Black Lives Matter because when we get the data, what we see is that Black life is valued less by our system, especially in this death penalty scheme.
Taylor Bonner 14:13
Correct.
Anne Holsinger 14:14
Furonda, I’d like to hear about how racial justice advocacy, including, you know, the data and the storytelling that you and Taylor have talked about, influences death penalty legislation and what strategies you’ve used in building diverse coalitions.
Furonda Brasfield 14:30
Racial justice advocacy is really important in death penalty legislation. As we move bills forward to abolish the death penalty, we have to be very clear about how the death penalty is being applied in these individual states and federally as well. And when we look at the data, what we can tell lawmakers as they make these very important decisions is that the death penalty is racist, that’s reason enoughto abolish the death penalty and to not have this practice on the books because it is historically and currently being applied in a racially disparate way. Another thing that we look at when we look at death penalty legislation, we look at methods of execution. One method of execution that has been more popular lately for states is nitrogen hypoxia. Nitrogen hypoxia is essentially gassing someone to deathand if we look back into the history of this world and the history of terror against peoples, we look at the Holocaust and how Jewish people were being killed in gas chambers with similar gas. These types of atrocities that we’ve seen historically are making a comeback and we’ve got to be able to paint that picture for legislators, legislators to let them know that applying the death penalty in a racially disparate way or in a historically heinous manner that points back to some of the worst atrocities in this world’s history, it can’tbe tolerated.
Anne Holsinger 16:40
How has a racial justice framework affected past campaigns to abolish the death penalty? How do you adapt your work to different histories and politics in each state?
Furonda Brasfield 16:50
It’s also important to, when you’re working on campaigns, to adapt the different histories and politics in each state and that’s why the work that DPIC has done has been so important on highlighting what the histories are in individual states and how the history of those states, how we can see them today as we look back. That’s why the work that DPIC is doing to highlight racial data in individual states is so important because having the data is one thing, but having those stories and being able to tell the narratives of what has happened in individual states helps for lawmakers and individual citizens to find the death penalty and whatever campaign that we’re working on much more relevant because not only can they see this defendant, this person that has been accused of a heinous crime and they have been sentenced to death, but they can see historically how this capital punishment scheme has worked. They can see that is flawed. They can see that historically children have been murdered by the state. How they can see that historically innocent people have been murdered by the state. How they can see that this is not some sort of foolproof system that doesn’t at all consider race. No, it’s quite the contrary. We’ve got the data and we’ve got the stories to show that the capital punishment system in virtually every state considers race in its application. And that’s something that should not continue. It’s not something that should stand.
Anne Holsinger 18:52
Taylor, to build on that great context that Furonda just gave us, do you have examples of how data about racial disparities have influenced legislative debates and court decisions on the death penalty?
Taylor Bonner 19:04
I do. I think Furonda really highlighted that critical link of race, the death penalty, and how it needs to be at the forefront of lawmakers’ minds and faces. And I think a good example of that are the Racial Justice Acts. They’ve been passed in three states: Kentucky, North Carolina, and California. So, these racial justice acts explicitly allow incarcerated folks to use statistics to show that race was a significant factor in seeking or imposing their death sentences. These laws are a direct pushback against McCleskey v. Kemp, decided in 1987, which said that even clear statistical disparities weren’t enough. Defendants had to prove that discrimination was intentional.So these racial justice acts, or RJAs, flip that script. So they recognize that the data itself is powerful evidence. Going back to what Furonda stated, they’re powerful evidence of systemic racism, and they let that evidence be part of the fight for justice. So, someone who has used the RJA is Hassan Bacote, a Black man who challenged his death sentence under North Carolina’s RJA. Under that, he argued that racial discrimination played a serious role in his death sentence. And this is recent, in February 2025, Superior Court Judge Waylon J. Sermons Jr. ruled that race played an “impermissible role” in jury selection in Mr. Bacote’s case. So together with these acts and in Mr. Bacote’s case, these show how statistical evidence and racial disparities have influenced policymaking and court decisions.However, I feel like with all that we already know and what Furonda and I have already talked about today, there is still some progress that needs to be made in the legislative field.
Anne Holsinger 21:25
Yeah, thank you for mentioning Mr. Bacote in North Carolina. He was, just to add a little extra context, he was one of the people who Governor Cooper of North Carolina granted clemency to as he left office in late 2024. To go back to you, Furonda, how do you engage communities of color in your advocacy against the death penalty, particularly communities that may also be disproportionately impacted by violent crime?
Furonda Brasfield 21:52
It’s really important to understand that communities of color are not a monolith and that’s something that even I had to learn early on in my organizing career. It’s not a safe assumption to believe that just because someone is Black, that they are opposed to the death penalty. So, being intentional about engaging communities of color is something that’s really important in death penalty advocacy. Making sure that communities of color understand, first, the racial disparity in the death penalty system, that communities of color understand the history of how we got here and how the death penalty system in this country came to be, to help people to understand how the law is applied, because on its face, I mean, it says, hey, the death penalty is an available sentence. It doesn’t say anything about race, but it’s being applied in a racially disparate way, and it is able to be applied in a racially disparate way. So that’s something really important to to point out and to make sure that we are educating communities of color, all communities, but communities of color as well, particularly. And in addition to that, it’s being really intentional about coalition building because transactional organizing is not what we’re doing here. We are building intentional coalitions and painting the picture about how different campaigns and different causes align. And I’ll give you an example. When I was a foot to the ground death penalty organizer, I worked with a number ofdifferent groups. They were not death penalty groups. I worked with Decarcerate Arkansas, the group that was designed to abolish mass incarceration and stop mass incarceration in the state of Arkansas. We aligned because we were working on similar criminallegal issues. And we could see how, with both of our issues, African Americans were disproportionately affected. Working with groups, that groups that are designed to promote racial justice like the Movement for Black Lives and making sure that we are at the table so that we can, as we are moving forward with racial justice strategy, that the death penalty is at the table and that we are able to make sure that the voices of those that are on the road, those that have been executed, that those voices are heard. Working with unlikely partners sometimes, you know, make working with conservatives to make sure that it is understood that our government is working in an arbitrary way when it is applying the death penalty. And so it should not be an available sentence. So not only working with engaging communities of color but working with groups that may not be usual suspects when we talk about the death penalty, but being intentional and deliberate about building those broad coalitions so that we could move forward together. It’s also painting through lines. You know, when we talk about the death penalty, especially the death penalty as applied to racial minorities in America, we also need to have the conversation about fascism, because we know that one of the tools of fascism is designating a group whose lives are worth more, and then also designating other groups, enemy groups, or less valuable groups or groups that are a threat and treating them in a disparate manner. So we should have that conversation as well as we were talking about having the death penalty available.It’s a fascist tool. How is it being applied, working with people that want to combat fascism and authoritarianism. So working withcommunities of color, yes, but also working with a broader coalition of individuals that even the basic theme may be protecting human rights.
Taylor Bonner 26:46
And I just want to follow up on something you said, Furonda, that really resonated with me when you said communities of color are not a monolith. I think that is super important and I feel like folks of color who are doing this work, I feel like we have to emphasize that a lotand we can’t implement change. We can’t do the work that we do if that is the dominant narrative that’s being put out. And I also like how you made the distinction between transactional organizing and intentional coalitions. Making that distinction and focusing on intentional coalitions, I think that is like an excellent theory of change for organizing.
Like you can’t have effective organizing and effective movements without being intentional. So I really appreciate you going through that.
Furonda Brasfield 27:38
Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for that, Taylor. You know, and, and sometimes when we are organizing to others, it may not, it may not make sense why we would stand with our immigrant neighbors as abolitionists to make sure that people are having due process rights so that people’s basic human rights are not being violated. It might not make sense to some people why we are standing in poor people’s movements and we are standing with environmental justice and why we are standing with voter engagement. You know, all of these things are, believe it or not, interrelated. And when we are creating these intentional coalitions and are standing with other issues, it’s not a, well, I need you, we’re having a rally or a vigil and we need you to show up for us and we are never going to support all of these other important issues that make it much easier if an immigrant’s rights to due process are acceptably violated it makes it much more easy for due process of the law to not apply to any of us. So I think that it’s really important that we see those through lines, that we do power mapping, that we understand that we are stronger together, and that even If this is not squarely within your issue base, you may need to consider creating coalitions that include those things so that to strengthen your base and to know that we’remore powerful when we stand up together.
Anne Holsinger 29:33
To draw another through line, I have a question for both of you. How can data and grassroots organizing work in conjunction to address racial justice issues and capital punishment? Taylor, would you like to go first?
Taylor Bonner 29:46
Happily. We definitely referenced this earlier in the conversation, but to elaborate more, I’d say data lays it bare. Who is being sentenced, who sits on juries, whose lives are valued, and where the system is most unjust. It’s the truth we can’t ignore. But the truth alone won’t move mountains. That’s where organizers, I feel like, step in. The community leaders, the activists, the people on the ground, taking that data and evidence and turning it into action. They educate, they agitate, they hold power accountable, they push for real change. Like, I just have so much respect for those people on the ground. Watching organizers take these hard facts, cold numbers, and turn them into movements that save lives, that’s the courage in action. In short, I would say data tells the story, organizing makes sure the story hits hard and together, we all make it impossible for the system and anyone else to look the other way.And that’s how change happens.
Furonda Brasfield 31:01
That was great, Taylor. You know, when I think about the history, when I think about Black history, I think about how grassroots movements have used the truth, which is data. Data is essentially the truth. They’ve used the truth to make change that nobody thought was possible. They shined a light. People like Ida B. Wells, shined a light on the lynching that was happening in this country.Not only did she shine a light on it, she wrote about it. She made sure that people could not ignore what was happening and I think that that is exactly what we as death penalty abolitionists, that’s what we do. And that’s what we’re called to do in this time, to bring forth not only the narratives about the campaigns, but to bring forth the data so that it is undeniable that the death penalty in this country is being applied in a racially disparate way. We owe that to communities, not just communities of color; we owe that to our country. And especially at a time where history is being banned, where history is being rewritten. When you look on the internet, it’s very difficult to know if an article or a story is real or fake. Being a trusted source so that communities can know, so that our young people can have a very truthful and not sanitized or whitewashed version of history so that they can move forward, so that we can not repeat those same cycles that we’ve fallen victim to in our country time and time again.
Taylor Bonner 33:15
And I’ll also say thank you for mentioning Ida B. Wells. I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention her on a Black History Month podcast on the death penalty.
Anne Holsinger 33:24
Absolutely. As we wrap up our conversation honoring the 100th anniversary of Black History Month and reflect on what we’vediscussed today, what messages do you want to leave our listeners with about race and the death penalty? Furonda, would you like to go first on this one?
Furonda Brasfield 33:39
When I think about Black History Month, the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, one of the themes or quotes that just keeps coming back up in my mind is, ‘the truth will set you free.’ We’ve seen that with the slavery abolition movement, where the truth and our country really coming to grips and to face with the atrocities, that were slavery in this country, that’s what set us free. When I look back in the Civil Rights movement, leaders like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X, when I look about, when I look at how those people spoke truth to power and forced our country to confront evils and very ugly practices that were happening in our country and that some of those things are continuing to happen. But it took the truth. It took the data. It took the stories in order to force our country to face itself and to make change and so as we are going through this 100th anniversary of Black History Month, I am calling on our death penalty abolitionists. I’m calling on everyone to make sure that we are using our voices, that we are uplifting truthful narratives, that we are providing communities with the information that they need to combat these practices in their individual states. It’s going to take everybody to do it.
Taylor Bonner 35:44
I’m snapping my fingers also for Furonda’s answer. Yeah, as I reflect on 100 years of Black history, I want to leave with this. Black history is American history. I have shared with the data and stories. Furonda has also shared. You can’t separate the story of race in this country from the story of punishment and the law. From lynching, from segregation, from the exclusion of the Black community, from juries, from the long struggle for equal protection under the law, that history matters because its patterns have not disappeared.They have just evolved. And I say this not as someone who has worked in the field, but as a Black woman. As I work, I always think about how my identity shapes how I view the system and how that system has historically affected people who look like me. So when I’m working within the data, when I’m studying these cases, when I’m telling stories, when I’m looking at who is sentenced to death under this system, I’m confronting a legacy that has touched generations of Black communities. Another message I have is to stay engaged, stay informed. Don’t shy away from these hard truths and facts. And when the punishment is death, confronting racial disparities is not optional. It’s necessary. And that’s how we honor Black history.
Furonda Brasfield 37:27
Mic drop.
Anne Holsinger 37:29
Thank you both so much. I agree with Furonda, I think we ended on a mic drop, so I’ll just wrap up here. To learn more about the work of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty, visit their website at enddeathpenalty.org. To learn more about the death penalty across the U.S., you can visit DPI’s website at deathpenaltyinfo.org. To support the 12:01 podcast and all of DPI’s work, please visit deathpenaltyinfo.org/donate. And to make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to 12:01 in your podcast app of choice.
