Lynching past and present: Race and the death penalty

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2001 by Hawkins, Steven

More than half of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty. The U.S. ranks third in the world in the number of reported executions carried out and has killed more child offenders than any other nation. If a person convicted of a capital crime is poor or kills a white person, he or she is more likely to receive the death penalty. Forty-three percent of the nation's death row population is Black. In the past two decades, 90 people on death row have been found innocent and were released. Fifty-seven percent of the wrongly convicted were people of color. BY STEVEN HAWKINS

After mountains of data and years of debate over the death penalty and biases in its imposition, the issue is coming to light in a new way. Recent DNA exonerations have gotten the public's attention, creating a special opportunity for the country to move a step closer to its claim of "justice for all." In February, the Gallup Organization found 67 percent of Americans say they still believe in capital punishment. Yet in 1999, 65 percent of people surveyed by Gallup said they believed there is a two-tier justice system in the United States: one for the rich, another for the poor. And in the same survey of 511 adults, 50 percent said they believe that Black defendants are more likely to get a death sentence than white ones.

Is it any wonder that we've seen recent calls for a moratorium on the death penalty. Illinois Gov. George H. Ryan (R) set the tone last year when he declared a state moratorium. North Carolina's legislature is considering a moratorium, and a bill in Maryland's state body made it all the way to the floor before opponents filibustered and let it die. Even some conservatives are questioning the wisdom of capital punishment if innocent people are being killed. And with good reason.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976, 90 people in 22 states have been released from death row for wrongful convictions. Since 1993, DNA technology has freed approximately one of four innocent people.

Given the history of racism and the death penalty, it's not surprising that people of color compose the majority (57 percent) of those being released. You can pick from any number of such cases and find evidence of race and class bias. Take, for example, the story of Earl Washington Jr., a Black man who last year was freed from Virginia's death row after 16 years. Washington, who is mentally retarded, was arrested in 1983 on another charge, but police persuaded him to admit to the rape and murder of a white woman committed the previous year. He later recanted his statement, and DNA testing proved his innocence. Last October, Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R) granted Washington an absolute pardon.

Then there's the case of Clarence Brandley, who spent 10 years waiting to die in Texas. Brandley was the head janitor at a high school where a young white female student was found strangled in 1980. When police arrived at the crime scene and saw Brandley, a Black man, and another janitor, who was white, they reportedly declared: "One of you two is gonna hang for this. Since you're the nigger, you're elected." Brandley, now a minister, was released from death row in 1990 when all charges against him were dropped after a Department of Justice and FBI investigation uncovered trial misconduct.

Other African American men have not been as fortunate.

Gary Graham was arrested in Texas at age 17 on charges of committing a series of robberies. He also was charged with the murder of a white man in the parking lot of a supermarket. Graham admitted his guilt in the robberies, but adamantly denied any involvement in the supermarket shooting. Family members vouched for his whereabouts on the night of the shooting, and the gun used in the slaying did not match the one found in Graham's possession. The prosecution's entire case relied on one eyewitness, though there were two supermarket employees who saw the assailant in the store. The market employees were never called to testify. They later told police Graham was not the shooter, but the appeals courts declined to hear their accounts.

Graham was poor, and his courtappointed lawyer failed to investigate his claim of innocence, never even interviewing the two eyewitnesses from the store. Graham was executed last June, after then-Gov. George W. Bush (R) turned down his clemency request. Activists Jesse L. Jackson and Al Sharpton were with Graham at the end of his life, and spoke afterward about how he maintained his innocence until his last breath.

THE DEATH

ROW RECORD

On Jan. 11, Wanda jean Allen became the first Black woman to be executed in the United States since 1954, and the first woman to be executed in Oklahoma since 1903. Her death sentence had little to do with her crime (she maintained she shot her female lover in self-defense during a domestic dispute) and everything to do with her race, her poverty and her mental status.

Allen's execution by injection occurred in the only industrialized Western country that still legally kills its citizens. Last year, 85 people were put to death in the United States. This year, 27 have been executed as of April 26, a record pace. Thirty-eight states, as well as the federal government and the U.S. military, sanction the death penalty. Twenty-three of those states impose it on minors, and 25 on the mentally retarded.