Tennessean Op-Ed Discusses DPIC Report on Race and Tennessee’s Death Penalty

On November 2, 2023, Demetrius Minor, the National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty and Davis Turner, a retired attor­ney whose broth­er was mur­dered in Nashville in 2009 and a board mem­ber of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, co-authored an op-ed in The Tennessean dis­cussing a recent report by the Death Penalty Information Center. ​“Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty” details the his­to­ry of racial vio­lence and use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Tennessee. Mr. Minor and Mr. Turner note that the report, ​“shows that uneven jus­tice con­tin­ues to dele­git­imize the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem in the present day.”

DPIC’s report ana­lyzed data on death sen­tences imposed in Tennessee and found, among oth­er racial dis­par­i­ties, that pros­e­cu­tors are more like­ly to seek the death penal­ty in cap­i­tal cas­es involv­ing white vic­tims. The authors write, ​“Until the state can erad­i­cate racial bias from the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty – which is not pos­si­ble – it shouldn’t use it.” They explain, ​“The issues high­light­ed in this report are among the grow­ing list of con­cerns that con­ser­v­a­tives have about the death penal­ty, among them are the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent (192 exon­er­a­tions since 1972), the finan­cial costs, and the toll the decades long process takes on vic­tims’ families.”

Mr. Minor and Mr. Turner also express con­cern regard­ing the lack of trans­paren­cy by the Tennessee Department of Corrections and ques­tion Tennessee’s com­pe­ten­cy to admin­is­ter exe­cu­tions. The cur­rent devel­op­ment of a new exe­cu­tion pro­to­col has remained in secre­cy. ​“Tennessee should not join states like Alabama and South Carolina in tin­ker­ing with exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols and spend­ing years and mil­lions of tax­pay­er dol­lars in lit­i­ga­tion over the new pro­to­cols when we have alter­na­tive sen­tences that can keep the public safe.”