Death penalty foes see ties to protests
Parallels to lynchings cited in new report
Opponents of the death penalty are finding their arguments about the history of state-sanctioned executions fit into a wider discourse about racial injustice amid nationwide protests against police brutality and racism.
It’s into that environment, where protesters have marched since George Floyd’s death at the hands of a white police officer in May, that the Death Penalty Information Center released a new report on the history of the death penalty and racial discrimination.
“We have seen more explicit reference to the continued racial discrimination in the death penalty in the last few months,” said Ngozi Ndulue, the report’s lead author. “This is a moment that advocates are really looking for concrete changes and what we’re trying to do with this report — the bulk of it was written before the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd — ties really into the moment of reckoning
of racial justice the country is having right now.”
Report ties history of lynchings to today’s death penalty
It’s also a time when people are ready to reckon with the country’s legacy of lynchings, the Jim Crow Era and slavery, Ndulue said — and how those things gave rise to modern-day capital punishment.
Executions were often offered as an alternative to public lynchings, the report found.
And the death penalty, like lynchings, was used to support white supremacy and to send a message to Black residents of a community, Ndulue said.
“Public discussion about lynchings highlighted the connection between non-officially sanctioned mob violence and the legal capital punishment system,” it states. “At times, the promise of a swift officially sanctioned death penalty was used to deter would-be participants in lynch mobs. Executions following these show trials with little process and a preordained outcome were described by activists as ‘legal lynchings.”
This connection between lynchings in the United States’ past and the modern-day death penalty has been drawn by others. In a recent opinion piece for MLK50, Joia Thornton, civil rights advocate with Just City and Memphis organizer with Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, made the connection to the case of Pervis Payne, a Tennessee man who is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3 for the 1987 stabbing deaths of Millington woman Charisse Christopher, 28, and her 2-year-old daughter, Lacie. Christopher’s 3-yearold son, Nicholas, survived multiple stab wounds.
“I really wanted to bring it on home to Shelby County,” Thornton said. “When you unpack a lot of the history of Shelby County considering what’s going on now in the criminal justice reform landscape, you cannot ignore the similarities between our lynching cases and our capital punishment cases now . ... Sometimes the ground is fertile and ripe for you to plant ideas into the minds of people for them to come to their own conclusions about capital punishment and what they feel about cases like Pervis Payne.” It also was a theme that pervaded a recent news conference of advocates urging the courts to allow for DNA testing in Payne’s case.
“There’s nothing different here than what we’re seeing laid out every day where Black men, where those who are at the lower end of the socio-economic scale are victims all too often of the terrors of errors in the injustice system. Our job is to cure that deficit,” said state Rep. G.A. Hardaway, D-memphis, who spoke at the news conference. “It’s the same lack of due process that allowed institutional lynching.”
Payne, a Black man, said during his 1988 trial that he discovered the gruesome crime scene after hearing calls for help through the open door of the apartment. He said he bent down to try to help, getting blood on his clothes and pulling at the knife still lodged in Christopher’s throat. When a white police officer arrived, Payne, who is Black, said he panicked and ran, fearing he would be seen as the prime suspect.
Payne has intellectual disabilities and had no prior criminal history, according to his attorneys.
In the trial and during sentencing, the prosecution relied on racial stereotypes and stressed that the victims in the crime were white, Payne’s attorneys have said.
A judge ruled Wednesday that DNA evidence may be tested in Payne’s case.
Studies show racial disparities in executions, other aspects of criminal justice
Ndulue said she hopes the new report will help to generate conversation that leads to addressing the issues, although the issues are not new.
The report also details the findings of multiple studies, including:
• A 2015 analysis of 30 studies that showed the killers of white people were more likely than the killers of Black people to face capital prosecution
• A study in North Carolina showed that qualified Black jurors were struck from juries at more than twice the rate of qualified white jurors
• Since executions resumed in 1977, 295 African-americans defendants have been executed for the murder of a white victim, while only 21 white defendants have been executed for the murder of an African-american victim.
• Exonerations of African Americans for murder convictions are 22 percent more likely to be linked to police misconduct, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
• A review of 2,000 Georgia murder cases found that when controlling for 230 variables related to the crime and characteristics of the offender, the odds that a murder defendant would be sentenced to death were 4.3 times greater when the victim was white.
“I think it’s a conversation that has been happening, but I do think there’s something about when folks are ready to listen, when this is something that we actually as a nation are ready to reckon with the continued legacy of lynching and continued presence in our minds and institutions,” Ndulue said. “I think there might be a different level of openness because of the conversation that we’ve been having since the death of George Floyd.”