"The question with which we must deal is not whether a substantial proportion of American citizens would today, if polled, opine that capital punishment is barbarously cruel, but whether they would find it to be so in light of all information presently available." - Justice Thurgood Marshall |
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ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF RACIAL BIAS IN THE DEATH PENALTY Claims that the death penalty is racially biased are greatly exaggerated. Many of the reasons that are often claimed to point to racial injustice actually are indicative of related problems that coincide with racial statistics. For example, the frequent conviction of murders of white victims is not due simply to the fact that the victim was white, but to the fact that aggravating factors (which result in a higher number of death sentences) are present more often in white victim murders. The table below shows rates and numbers of executions, showing that more whites were executed than all other races together.
49 of the people executed in the year 2000 were white; 35 were black, and 1 was an American Indian. Of all murders in the United States, 63% are committed by members of minorities. As the graph below shows, 1,990 of convicted criminals pending death sentence in 2000 were identified as white, and 1,535 were black - in addition, there were 27 Asian-Americans, 29 American Indians, and 12 convicts of an unknown racial background. Department of Justice Statistics
As this table shows, whites are twice as likely to be executed for the crime of murder, and studies show that whites sentenced to death row usually are executed 15 months more quickly than blacks. The ratio of white murder victims to African-American murder victims is 7:1; however, the reason for the imbalance in conviction is not racial in origin - the aggravating factors that are more likely to sentence a convicted murderer to capital punishment tend to be present more often in white victim killings than black victim killings. |
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