More Than One-Third Of All U.S. Executions Took Place In Texas

[ProSense]

More Than One-Third Of All U.S. Executions Took Place In Texas

By Ian Millhiser

The Economist maps out every American execution since 1976, when the Supreme Court announced the modern constitutional regime governing death penalty cases after effectively suspending all executions nationwide for four years. Over one-third of all executions during this period took place in Texas, for a total of 481 people killed by that state. Of the remaining, non-Texas executions, the overwhelming majority are clustered in a small group of southern states:



It’s worth noting that, although the death penalty is still technically legal in most states, actual executions are very rare in most of the country — even after a person has been sentenced to death row. According to a 2011 study by the Death Penalty Information Center, thirty-two U.S. jurisdictions executed no one in the previous five years and more than half of those jurisdictions executed no one after the Supreme Court permitted executions to continue in 1976. Only 12 states executed someone in 2010, and only 7 states executed more than one person.

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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/04/22/468941/more-than-one-third-of-all-us-executions-took-place-in-texas/

North Carolina Judge Finds Racial Discrimination in Death Penalty, Commutes Death Sentence to Life Without Parole
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002588189

[Swede Atlanta]

1. This statistic reveals one of two things....

Either they are just out to kill anyone for any reason or their Christian values are generating lots of really bad crimes. Which is it Texas? If I had one wish it would be we could expel them from the union, not allow any mail, telephone calls, border crossings, anything to or from Texas. Trust me, the short-term pain in energy, etc. would be offset by not having any more idiots from that state destroying our country.

My apologies to those sane Texans. We would welcome you to move to our country!!!

[ProSense]

2. ACLU: The U.S. Death Penalty — An International Human Rights Wrong?

The U.S. Death Penalty — An International Human Rights Wrong?

Posted by Avinash Samarth

<...>

Despite our government's own admission and acknowledgement of such overrepresentation, some federal and state government officials seem shockingly unconcerned. Philip Alston, the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, visited the United States in 2008 at the invitation of the Bush administration and met with federal and state officials, judges, civil society groups (including the ACLU), victims, and witnesses throughout the country. He too found that "the weight of scholarship suggests that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed when the victim is white, and/or the defendant is African American." Yet when Alston raised racial disparity concerns with individual federal and state government officials, he writes:

I was met with indifference or flat denial. Some officials had not read any specific reports or studies on race disparity and showed little concern for the issue. […] These responses are highly disappointing. They suggest a damaging unwillingness to confront the role that race can play in the criminal justice system generally, and the imposition of the death penalty specifically.

But the evidence is just too clear and too extraordinary to justify such nonchalance. In a recent ACLU briefing paper, we explained:

A 2000 Justice Department study [found] wide racial and geographic disparities in the federal government's requests for death sentences. In 2011, racial minorities constituted 56% of the 3,220 people on death row. In 96% of states where race studies have been conducted, involving either race of victim or race of defendant, both disparities have been observed. […] Immediately, the Obama Administration should fulfill its explicit commitment to undertake a new federal study examining the racial disparities in the application of the death penalty.

When the Supreme Court first struck down the death penalty in 1972, it castigated capital punishment as so arbitrary as to be akin to "being struck by lightning." And after the reinstatement of executions in 1976, studies by European and U.N. human rights bodies, and even the United States government, have conclusively shown something much more alarming: that these lightning strikes are guided by race, class and geography.

It is therefore unsurprising that the legitimacy of our death penalty is imploding on the world stage, especially as the number of countries that still practice executions dwindles. Only 20 countries still carry out the death penalty, down from 31 a decade ago. In 2011, the top five executioners were China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and the United States, which executed 43 people out of the 676 known to have been executed worldwide that year. This is not the company we want to keep. Worse, we are showcasing to the world that race discrimination is at the core of our system of capital punishment, and our own judicial system is still voluntarily blind to its poisonous presence.

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http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/us-death-penalty-international-human-rights-wrong

When people mention statistics about the number of blacks being imprisoned for one reason or another, often for political arguments, they rarely mention this blatant fact: Blacks also represent a disproportionate percentage of those being executed under the death penalty.