The racial bias of the US death penalty
The racial bias of the US death penalty
What does it mean that just a handful of counties, mostly in the South, are responsible for the majority of executions in the US?
David A Love guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 January 2012 15.33 EST
The application of the US death penalty is unfair, arbitrary and racially biased. Whether a defendant receives a death sentence depends not on the merits of the case, so much as on his or her skin colour – and the race of the victim – and the county in which the murder case was prosecuted. Two recent news items in the US provide some illustrative context.
First, the issue of bias: the North Carolina Senate recently approved Senate Bill 9, a measure that would repeal the state's Racial Justice Act. The act, signed into law by Governor Bev Purdue in 2009, allows inmates to challenge their death sentences through statistical evidence of racial bias, including the exclusion of blacks from juries. Republican lawmakers and prosecutors opposed the law.
Fortunately, the governor vetoed SB9, which would have required prosecutors to openly confess to racism. This would have made it far more difficult for prisoners to prove racial discrimination in their sentence, despite evidence such as a study of North Carolina which found that defendants whose victims were white were 3.5 times more likely to receive a death sentence.
Second, the geographical anomalies: an analysis by the Houston Chronicle found that 12 of the last 13 people condemned to death in Harris County, Texas were black. After Texas itself, Harris County is the national leader in its number of executions. Over one third of Texas's 305 death row inmates – and half of the state's 121 black death row prisoners – are from Harris County. One of those African Americans, Duane Buck, was sentenced based on the testimony of an expert psychologist who maintained that blacks are prone to violence. In 2008, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal resigned after sending an email message titled "fatal overdose", featuring a photo of a black man lying on the ground surrounded by watermelons and a bucket of chicken.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/03/racial-bias-us-death-penalty