STUDIES: Lynchings in America Related to Racial Bias in Death Penalty

A new report from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) of Alabama has doc­u­ment­ed more lynch­ings in American his­to­ry than pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly of African Americans in the South, and has drawn par­al­lels between this prac­tice and the mod­ern death penalty. 

According to EJI, the report – titled Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror –“makes the case that lynch­ing of African Americans was ter­ror­ism, a wide­ly sup­port­ed phe­nom­e­non used to enforce racial sub­or­di­na­tion and seg­re­ga­tion.” The report draws con­nec­tions between lynch­ings and abus­es in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem that per­sist today: “[L]ynching rein­forced a nar­ra­tive of racial dif­fer­ence and a lega­cy of racial inequal­i­ty that is read­i­ly appar­ent in our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem today. Mass incar­cer­a­tion, racial­ly biased cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, exces­sive sen­tenc­ing, dis­pro­por­tion­ate sen­tenc­ing of racial minori­ties, and police abuse of peo­ple of col­or reveal prob­lems in American soci­ety that were shaped by the ter­ror era.” (empha­sis added). 

A New York Times edi­to­r­i­al about the report made a sim­i­lar point: ​“The researchers argue, for exam­ple, that lynch­ing declined as a mech­a­nism of social con­trol as the Southern states shift­ed to a cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment strat­e­gy, in which blacks began more fre­quent­ly to be exe­cut­ed after expe­dit­ed tri­als. The lega­cy of lynch­ing was appar­ent in that pub­lic exe­cu­tions were still being used to mol­li­fy mobs in the 1930s even after such exe­cu­tions were legally banned.”