Study detects racism in death penalty
I’m an opponent of the death penalty. It’s a primitive ritual based on the ‘eye for an eye’ principle, not a deterrent. Killers don’t factor it in to their decision making process: ‘I better not rape and kill this person, that’d put me up for the death penalty!’
Removing that peg from the death penalty’s buttress exposes it for what it really is: a societal showcase for getting even — not with just the one bad guy — but with their nightmarish relationship with crime.
Like-minded opponents who have stood on this moral footing have always been overshadowed by those who revel in death as a means to justice, which is supposed to be blind or equal.
That’s apparently not the case in Harris County (Houston) Texas, where a study into the application of the death penalty has discovered two very unfair conclusions on its use:
The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.
But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.
…
For every 100 black defendants and 100 white defendants indicted for capital murder in Harris County, Professor Phillips found that an average of 12 white defendants and 17 black ones would be sent to death row. In other words, Professor Phillips wrote, “five black defendants would be sentenced to the ultimate sanction because of race.”
Obviously the DA rejects these claims flatly:
Scott Durfee, the general counsel for the Harris County district attorney’s office, rejected Professor Phillips’s conclusions and said that district attorneys there had long taken steps to insulate themselves from knowing the race of defendants and victims as they decided whether to seek the death penalty.
The problem with the DA’s rebuttal is that this problem has very little to do with them — at least not in the respect they refute. In fact, the study noted that the DA’s requests for the death penalty were even across races in between 1992 and 1999.
Instead, the racist element is found in the juries. Certainly the DA preys on their fears, but the jurors in Houston, and in any place for that matter, are selected for their stereotypes. You may say, well, that can’t be since jurors are drawn from driver registration lists, that their appointments are random and a fair representation of society.
This is where the DA re-enters the equation. Before every trial there is jury selection or voir dire. Rules for this vary by state but generally each side can veto or challenge a few potential members. The DA is looking for jurors that will be amiable to their case: white, older, religious, exurban, not-overly educated. Selecting from this criteria, you’re going to get a pretty significant percentage of people who have had little or no relations with someone of a different race and thus their impressions will have been formed by means other than personal experience.
The defendant is free to exercise a similar criterion that is more favorable towards their side: not white, young, educated, urban. They face two issues though. (1) It’s Texas. (2) The educated are often tossed. If I went into a jury selection and said voir dire I’d probably be booted by both sides since they want to tell you their versions of the applicable laws and thus form your judgment of guilt or innocence.
What I’m getting at is that there are a lot of socio-economical shenanigans involved in how jurors are selected. Certainly prejudice and bias are part of all human activity, but should we invest the power of death in the hands of those who are selected for being white or exurban or religious? Is it fair for someone’s life to hang in the balance of jurors selected for their (lack of) life experiences?
We say that death is a power no one man can hold. I say it’s a power that no men should either.
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