Got this today from an author who writes about race.
Put To Death For Being Black: New Hope Against Judicial System Bias
North Carolina's Racial Justice Act finally acknowledges that there is a huge bias in who gets the death penalty
By Touré |
Touré's latest book, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?, was named a New York Times notable book of 2011
The
wind of revolution is beginning to blow through the halls of justice.
It’s a small breeze now and the impact of what many consider one of the
worst Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century still weighs heavily,
but in North Carolina something called the Racial Justice Act is
suggesting that a change is gonna come.
Many
studies have shown that there is significant racial bias in the
administration of the death penalty. Defendants are more likely to be
sentenced to death for killing whites than for killing blacks and black
defendants are more likely to get the death penalty than whites, as was
referenced in David Baldus’s 1998 report “Racial Discrimination and the Death Penalty”. But a study
by Jennifer Eberhardt found the impact of race to be even more nuanced:
judges and juries perceive defendants who have physical traits that are
stereotypically associated with blackness (broad nose, big lips, dark
skin) to be more “death worthy.” What a horrific term. In Eberhardt’s
study, stereotypically black-looking defendants were twice as likely to
be sentenced to death. Sociologists know that race matters in capital
punishment, but the Supreme Court has refused to notice since a 1987
decision in McClesky v Kemp.
A Los Angeles Times survey of liberal legal scholars named McClesky one of the worst decisions since World War II. NYU law professor Anthony Anderson called it
“the Dred Scott of our time,” referencing the 1857 decision that upheld
slavery. Ohio State University Professor Michelle Alexander told me it
was the Plessy v Ferguson of our time, referencing the 1896 decision to
justify racial segregation. Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the majority
opinion on McClesky, later told his biographer that was one of two votes he regretted.
Warren
McClesky was a black man who was convicted of killing a Georgia police
officer in 1978. His legal team produced a study showing racial
inequality in the death penalty — specifically that blacks convicted of
killing whites in Georgia were four times more likely to be sentenced to
death than those convicted of killing non-whites. The court accepted
the statistics but rejected McClesky’s appeal and wrote, “disparities in
sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.” So
racism is in the mechanism of administering death but … so be it. Bias
was found to shape capital punishment and that was acceptable? In
dissent, Justice William Brennan wrote,
“That a decision to impose the death penalty could be influenced by
race is a particularly repugnant prospect, and evidence that race may
play even a modest role in levying a death sentence should be enough to
characterize that sentence as ‘cruel and unusual.’ ” In another
dissenting opinion in a different capital punishment case, 1994′s
Callins v Collins, Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote that it’s impossible to rid racial bias from the death penalty so “I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”
Since
McClesky, judges have not allowed defense attorneys to show juries
studies proving racial bias in death sentencing, making it impossible to
challenge bias at any stage of the judicial process. It’s as if racism
only matters when it operates as a specific stated conspiracy rather
than a ghost in the machine animated by an accumulation of bias. But two
challenges have arisen. From the South.
Racial
Justice Acts were passed in Kentucky in 1998 and in North Carolina in
2009, stipulating that if race is found to be a significant factor in
the imposition of the death penalty, then death will be commuted to life
without parole. North Carolina’s act allows three areas in which to
argue significant racial bias: that a death sentence is more likely
because of the race of the defendant; that a death sentence is more
likely because of the race of the victim; or that jury selection was
racially biased.
Almost
as soon as North Carolina’s act was passed, nearly all death row
inmates began challenging their sentences. The first challenge to reach
the court was filed by 38 year-old Marcus Reymond Robinson, who was
sentenced to death for the 1991 kidnapping and murder of a 17-year-old
from whom he stole a car and $27. Robinson was convicted by a jury
composed of nine whites, two blacks and one American Indian in a county
that’s 40% black. Last month, Robinson’s sentence was commuted to life
because his legal team successfully argued that race was a significant
factor in the dismissal of potential jurors. A racially diverse jury is
crucial to countering stereotypes and getting fairness. Imagine, white
readers, being on trial for murdering a black person and watching the
prosecutors remove white people from the jury pool just because they’re
white, and finding yourself in a room all but filled with blacks who
would judge your guilt and whether or not you would die for killing a
black person. Does that sound fair? Or frightening? Linking who lives
and who dies to race is unacceptable but we do it. Even if you believe
in the death penalty from a moral standpoint, racial disparities and
other human errors make it hard to trust humanity with the ultimate
penalty.
(MORE: Touré: Inside the Racist Mind)
Touré is the author of four books, including Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? The views expressed are solely his own.
Read other related stories about this:
- Bias Law Used to Move a Man Off Of Death Row The New York TImes
I agree with Toure, allowing race to determine whether or not a man receives the death penalty is unacceptable. McClesky vs. Kemp was a trial that I had never heard about until now. It seems rediculous that the court demissed the fact of racial bias, and even admitted that race plays a role in sentences! On top of that, it wouldn't allow any information regarding racial bias to be used as evidence in the trial or sentence determination. It took over twenty years for North Carolina to take a stand against the ruling, but I guess its better late than never. I think that because America was built on the foundation on equality, it is rediculous for courts to rule the opposite way. Racism is so last century, and I think that its time for American's to get over it. For the past semester we have studied how African Americans are more likely to be seen as criminals, even though we are way more likely to be victimized by predominately white men committing corporate crime. This image of blacks being more violent and dangerous was created by the media and it is effecting who we kill by way of the death penalty. Ultimately, the medias false images of race have influenced courts decisions to enact the death penalty, and this cannot go on. Whether or not it should be gone about by disposing of the death penalty, or finding some way for juries to be more representative of race; ultimately, it has to change.
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