Blacks much more likely to face death penalty, study says

Jet, May 12, 2003

Blacks who murder Whites are 15 times more likely to be executed than if they murdered other Blacks, so says a report from Amnesty International USA.

AIUSA, which opposes the death penalty, said 80 percent of the 845 people executed since the United States resumed the practice in 1977 were put to death for killing Whites. Since that time, according to the human rights organization, 200 Blacks have been executed for killing White victims, which is 15 times as many the number of Whites put to death for killing Blacks during that period. Also, juries containing no Blacks convicted those Blacks that were executed, the group stated in its report, Death By Discrimination--The Continuing Role Of Race In Capital Cases.

"A jury of one's peers is supposed to be broadly representative of one's peers," said William F. Schulz, the group's executive director, who contends that the death penalty in the United States remains an act of racial injustice as well as an inherently cruel and degrading punishment. "At least one in five of the African-Americans executed since 1977, and a quarter of the Blacks put to death for killing Whites, were tried in front of all-White juries," Schulz continued. "What are the odds that this happened for entirely non-discriminatory reasons?

"President Bush has promised that the U.S. will always stand firm for equal justice. If that's true, he must call for an immediate halt to federal executions and encourage states to follow suit ..."

AIUSA's findings, compiled from government statistics and its own tracking, show the death penalty is applied unfairly. Blacks comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, but 41 percent of those on death row and 35 percent of those executed between 1977 and 2001 were Black, according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

A Justice Department report in 2000 found that between 1995 and 2000, almost three-fourths of the 183 federal defendants facing the death penalty were minorities, and 43 percent of the defendants came from just nine of the 94 U.S. attorney districts: Puerto Rico; the Eastern District of Virginia; Maryland; the Eastern and Southern districts of New York; Western District of Missouri; New Mexico; Western District of Tennessee; and Northern District of Texas.

A Pennsylvania Supreme Court-appointed commission reported last month that Black defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death and recommended a moratorium on executions while the issue was studied. In Illinois, a study discovered that juries were three times more likely to sentence a Black person to death. Gov. George Ryan cited those findings in January when he commuted 167 death sentences (JET, Feb. 24).