Report: Race plays big role in death penalty
Blackpeople WASHINGTON— have been overrepresented on death rows across the United States and killers of Black people are less likely to face the death penalty than people who kill white people, a new report found.
The report fromthe Death Penalty Information Center is a history lesson in how lynchings and executions have been used in America and howdiscrimination bleeds into the entire criminal justice system. It traces a line fromlynchings of old — killings outside the law — where Black people were killed in an effort to assert social control during slavery and JimCrow, and howthat eventually translated into state-ordered executions.
It comes as the U.S. grapples with criminal justice and police reform following George Floyd’sdeath andthe deaths of other Black people at the hands of police and in thewake of mass protest. Across the country, 30
states have the death penalty but executions occur mostly in Southern states.
And the federal government this year began carrying out executions again after a 17-year hiatus despite waning public support for the death penalty. The center, a think tank that studies both state and federal capital cases, wrote that capital punishmentmust be included in the discussion of the past.
“I thinkwhat the data tells us and what history tells us is that they’re all part of the same phenomenon. The death penalty is inextricably linked to our history of slavery, of lynching, and Jim Crow segregation, and we wanted to put what is happening today in its appropriate context,” said Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center.
The report found that throughout the modern era, people of color have been overrepresented on death row — in 2019, 52% of the death rowinmateswere Black, but that number has dropped to 42% this year, when approximately 60% of the population is white. But it also showed that the killers ofwhite peoplewere more likely than the killers of Black people to face the deathpenalty, andcases with white victims were more likely to be investigated.
Since the death penalty resumed in 1977, 295 Black defendants were executed for killing a white victim, but only 21white defendants were executed for the killing of a Black victim even though Black people are disproportionately the victims of crime.