A Vast Racial Gap in Death Penalty Cases, New Study Finds

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

WASHINGTON — Black lives do not matter nearly as much as white ones when it comes to the death penalty, a new study has found. Building on data at the heart of a landmark 1987 Supreme Court decision, the study concluded that defendants convicted of killing white victims were executed at a rate 17 times greater than those convicted of killing Black victims.

There is little chance that the new findings would alter the current Supreme Court’s support for the death penalty. Its conservative majority has expressed impatience with efforts to block executions, and last month it issued a pair of 5-to-4 rulings in the middle of the night that allowed federal executions to resume after a 17-year hiatus.

But the court came within one vote of addressing racial bias in the administration of the death penalty in the 1987 decision, McCleskey v. Kemp. By a 5-to-4 vote, the court ruled that even solid statistical evidence of race discrimination in the capital justice system did not offend the Constitution.

The decision has not aged well.

In 1991, after he retired, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the author of the majority opinion, was asked whether there was any vote he would like to change.

“Yes,” he told his biographer. “McCleskey v. Kemp.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-vast-racial-gap-in-death-penalty-cases-new-study-finds/ar-BB17v2Fb?li=BBnb7Kz

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. THE HELL YOU SAY.

Abolish the death penalty.

[NewJeffCT]

2. I remember studying the death penalty at that time in college

there were huge racial gaps at the time as well. And, it's not just the racial gaps, if a conviction is later overturned, somebody that is dead can't be resurrected. If you're in prison for life & later found innocent, you can at least be set free.

What I remember from research at the time, though, is that the cases where the death penalty was sought the most was where somebody black killed somebody white. If you were black & killed a black person you were far less likely to get the death penalty than if you killed a white person.