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Thursday, May 3, 2012

Racial bias in the death penalty in the news

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.


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:
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/03/put-to-death-for-being-black-new-hope-against-judicial-system-bias/?xid=gonewsedit#ixzz1tom7N9jI

1 comment:

  1. 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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