Entries tagged with “Race”
Feb 25, 2026
Black History: Forty Years After Supreme Court Upheld “Death Qualification” of Juries, Data Consistently Shows Disproportionate Racial Exclusion
The Constitution mandates that juries be drawn from a“fair cross-section” of the community. Yet public opinion polls show that a substantial portion of the community opposes the death penalty. How, then, can the government seat a jury that will fairly decide whether to impose the death penalty *and* protect a defendant’s constitutional jury rights? The legal system’s longstanding answer to this question is a procedure called“death qualification,” which…
Feb 19, 2026
What to Know: Race and the Death Penalty
DPI’s“What to Know” series examines capital punishment from multiple angles, one topic at a time. Each installment provides essential facts and data on specific aspects of the death penalty. **Please visit DPI’s newly revamped** **Race** **landing page for a deeper dive into the issue.** ***Why it matters:*** Black people in the capital punishment system are disproportionately represented – currently comprising 40% of the death row population despite…
Jan 28, 2026
LDF Amicus Brief Challenges Racialized “Warrior Gene” in Capital Case
On January 20, 2026, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Amos Wells, a Black man in Texas who was sentenced to death in 2016 after a trial marked by racial bias and harmful stereotypes. The brief urges the Court to grant certiorari to address the continuing harm caused by the false stereotype that Black men are inherently violent. Central to Mr. Wells’ death sentence at trial was testimony about *monoamine oxidase…
Jan 14, 2026
New Analysis of Racial Bias and Death Eligibility in 2025
Justin D. Levinson and Rachel G. Schaefer recently published Flawed Framework, Fatal Discretion: Unraveling Implicit Bias in Capital Punishment Decisions. The article synthesizes multiple studies examining the role of implicit bias among key decisionmakers within the legal system. The authors use this research as evidence of both the historical and ongoing influence of implicit bias on the administration of the death penalty. In 2025, **75% of defendants against…
Nov 26, 2025
Article of Interest: ACLU Releases New Report Citing Pervasive Racial Imbalance in Capital Punishment System
On November 19, 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released *Fatal Flaws: Innocence, Race and Wrongful Convictions*, the second installment in its multi-part series examining racialized and structural failures in the nation’s capital punishment system. The first report of the series, Fatal Flaws: Revealing the Racial and Religious Gerrymandering of the Capital Jury, explored how the process of death qualification distorts the composition of capital juries.