The Death Penalty and Race

The Death Penalty and Race

To look closely at many of the mechanisms in American society is to observe the contradiction between constitutional equality and equality in practice. Several of these contradictions exist in the realm of racial equality. For example, Black s often get dealt an unfair hand in the criminal justice system. In The Real War on Crime, Steven Donziger explains,

There are so many more African-Americans than whites in our prisons that the difference cannot be explained by higher crime among African- Americans - racial discrimination is also at work, and it penalizes African- Americans at almost every juncture in the criminal justice system.1

This paper focuses in on one of those "junctures" - the death penalty. The racial disparities that Donziger finds in the prisons can also be found in death row. To be exact, African-Americans are 12% of the US population, but they make up 40% of the death row population.2 I, like Donziger, believe something more is at work; and in the tradition of Ture and Hamilton, I believe that this something works in covert ways. It would almost be better if we could place the blame on blatant racial discrimination. But the death penalty does not serve the explicit purpose of oppressing Blacks. Racism persists, but it has taken on more implicit, more subtle, and arguably more harmful forms. The death penalty is a timely lens through which to observe the covert racism that operates in institutional settings. This topic can be overwhelming, and this paper is in no way comprehensive. Rather, it is an opportunity to string together some soci ological and legal concepts with personal analysis in the desire to demonstrate that the death penalty and the institutions surrounding...

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...ziger, 100.

13 Chambliss, 250.

14 Chambliss, 248.

15 Donziger, 127.

16 Donziger, 109.

17 Donziger, 110.

18 Campaign to End the Death Penalty (pamphlet).

19 Leon Higgenbotham, Shades of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1996) xxv-xxvi.

20 Donziger, 109.

21 David C. Baldus, et al, "Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience," The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74 (1983): 663-664.

22 Baldus, 664.

23 Donziger, 109.

24 U.S. General Accounting Office, "Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates Patterns of Racial Disparities," The Death Penalty in America, 271.

25 Hugo Adams Bedau, The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 250.

26 Donziger, 113.

27 Ellsworth, 90.

28 Ellsworth, 92.

29 Chambliss, 243.

30 Ellsworth, 92.