Is The Death Penalty Racially Biased?
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U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced yesterday that a Justice Department review found no evidence of racial bias in the application of the death penalty. In fact, as Ashcroft pointed out, white murderers are sentenced to die slightly more often than black murderers (there are still a disproportionate number of black killers on death row, however, because of the disproportionately high rate of violent crime in the black community).
In its story on the announcement, The New York Times brings up pretty much the only remaining claim by those convinced that application of the death penalty is racist: that some studies have suggested that blacks who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to die than whites who kill blacks. This claim is heavily disputed, but lets assume for the moment that it is accurate — there is still a lot of information left out of this basic claim.
Although intraracial murders tend to garner a lot of publicity because of our national obsession with race, but they are in fact very rare. In 1999, for example, there were 452 murders in which the perpetrator was black and the victim was white and 154 murders in which the perpetrator was white and the victim was black.
That would account for some disproportional statistics on execution, but some studies have shown that for every 14 blacks executed for killing a white person, only 1 white is executed for killing a black person. Which sounds horribly racist until you consider what sorts of crimes people can be executed. Simply killing another human being is rarely considered grounds for the death penalty. Instead, prosecutors must typically show that there were aggravating circumstances to a murder to warrant capital punishment.
The most common aggravating circumstance cited in capital cases is that the murder was committed as part of an armed robbery. When you break out the numbers of robberies committed where there is some sort of injury to the victim and look at those statistics by race, what you find is that case where the perpetrator is black and the victim is white occurs about 21 times more frequently than where the robber is white and the victim is black.
Source:
Attorney General Says Report Shows No Racial Bias in Death Sentences. David Stout, New York Times, June 7, 2001.
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