Does the Death Penalty Discriminate?

Mr. Glendening has plenty of company in holding this position. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, for instance, asserts that "history and current practice continue to show that the death penalty is steeped in a tradition of racism and cannot, for that reason, be applied in a fair manner." According to Amnesty International, "The United States legal system is riddled with deeply ingrained racial and ethnic divisions. The prejudices of some police, jurors, judges and prosecutors reflect contemporary racial and ethnic divisions in US society – and nowhere is racial discrimination more evident, or more deadly, than in the application of the death penalty." The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty – which is comprised of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Urban League, and some 140 other organizations – complains that capital punishment is overwhelmingly reserved for racial minorities. Representative John Conyers emphatically agrees.

Louis Farrakhan goes even further, stating that "the unfair use of the death penalty to punish the black male is in fact a systematic genocidal tool being institutionalized to significantly decrease the black population." In 1996, Rev. Jesse Jackson co-authored the book Legal Lynching: Racism, Injustice, and the Death Penalty. At a recent Chicago rally, Jackson compared the inherent racism underlying capital punishment to the inherent racism that once supported the institution of slavery. "You couldn’t really fix slavery," said Jackson. "You couldn’t modify it. . . . We had to abolish the slavery system. Let’s abolish the death penalty."

If all the aforementioned charges were true, there would indeed be good reason to consider outlawing capital punishment. Certainly we cannot tolerate separate standards of justice based on race. Remarkably, however, none of the charges are true. While there may be valid moral and ethical reasons to oppose the death penalty, racial inequity is simply not one of them.

Consider the pertinent facts. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, whites who are arrested for murder or non-negligent manslaughter are actually more likely than their black counterparts to be sentenced to death (1.6 percent vs. 1.2 percent). Of those inmates under death sentences, whites are actually likelier than blacks to have their sentences carried out (7.2 percent vs. 5.9 percent). These disparities are not huge, and the purpose here is not to suggest that they indicate bias against whites; the point is that in no way do they support the notion of bias against blacks.

Contrary to the rhetoric of our contemporary racial arsonists and "civil rights" organizations, scholars have known for quite some time that capital punishment is not applied in a racist manner. In his 1987 book The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, Professor William Wilbanks cites an important study which found that between 1977 and 1984, white killers were actually more likely to get the death penalty than were black killers. Even more to the point, Wilbanks notes that "whites who had killed whites were more likely than blacks who had killed whites to be on death row, [and] whites who killed blacks were more likely to reach death row than blacks who killed blacks." In other words, even a full generation ago the anti-capital punishment crowd’s most popular contention was already nothing more than a hollow fable.

More recently, in their 1997 book America in Black and White, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom point out that "black offenders over the past generation have not been sentenced to death at a higher rate than white offenders. No careful scholarly study in recent years has demonstrated that the race of the defendant has played a significant role in the outcome of murder trials." The Thernstroms also note that while fully 58 percent of prisoners currently serving sentences for murder are black, only 40 percent of inmates on death row are black. That is, relative to the rate at which black offenders commit murder, they are sentenced to death in disproportionately low numbers.

Finally, if courts were unfairly imposing the death penalty against black defendants who deserved more leniency, we would expect to find that blacks on death row have cleaner criminal records than their white counterparts. But in fact, the exact opposite is true. Blacks awaiting execution are 10 percent likelier to have had felony convictions, and 20 percent likelier to have had homicide convictions, prior to the crimes that propelled them to death row.

Is it possible that Governor Glendening is unaware of these thorny but vital facts? If so, is it not irresponsible of him to parade the haunting, oft-unfurled banner of racism before the eyes the American people once again? Haven’t our perceptions of reality already been compromised enough by the nonsense of demagogues in recent decades?

John Perazzo is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click here. E-mail him at wsbooks25 [at] hotmail.com