Analysis Of The Article ' Disparities On Death Row '

In the article “Race, wrongful conviction and exoneration” by Earl smith and Angela J. Hattery, these sociologist discuss the issues of racial discrimination and the amount of wrongful convictions within the American justice system. They also discuss the issues on the lack of exonerations based on race in our prison systems. As stated in the article “Approximately 75% [of citizens] in jail are members of minority groups and on average have spent 13 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.” (Smith) This heart breaking statistic shows the true facts that there is an increasing issue in the amount of people in jail for crimes they did not commit due to their race. The main focus of the article is to raise awareness about the issues within our countries justice system and to understand the reasons for these inequalities on a deeper level.

In this week topic I have chosen the article about Black Female Executions. This article talks about isolate racist and sexist conduct of justice practitioners directed toward Black women and the imposition of capital punishment. The death penalty jurisdictions put to death 83% of Black women executed in the United States before the end of slavery. According to the article criminal justice researchers have failed to study female executions during that period, as well as during Reconstruction. The debate about racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is still unresolved.

Forty-Five years ago, Arthur Goldberg and Alan Dershowitz described death penalty as "unusual" under the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, saying, "Most commentators describe the imposition of the death penalty as not only haphazard and capricious, but also discriminatory. "' Noting that capital punishment impacts "disadvantaged minorities,"' Goldberg and Dershowitz delivered a prescient message:

Twenty two years after the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was constitutional, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) released a study examining the trials and sentences of 667 Murder convictions in Philadelphia between 1983 and 1993. The data shown above is a comparison of the races of the criminals and their victims.The DPIC found that around 15% of all black defendants were sentenced to the death penalty whereas, only 2.6% of white defendants were sentenced to the death penalty. That is a substantial difference that leads a reader to believe that our criminal justice system is in fact not colorblind. In our country we have a strong prejudice against the black community. The study shows that when a white person is murdered,

In this paper I will examine and prove that racial disparities do exists within The Criminal Justice System through the systematic targeting of people of color as well as through our Judicial System.

When a person is charged with Capital punishment we automatically think they are a dangerous criminal, but what if someone was charge simply because of their race. Well, there have been many researches done along with statistical evidence to confirm that this may be in fact the case for African-Americans. The United States Constitution was established so that every Citizen in America is guaranteed their basic rights which include; guarantee a fair process in all hearings and equal treatment under the law. African-Americans have struggled throughout our history with unfair treatment and equality. For example, the decades of slavery and the struggle of passing the equal voting rights bill in 1965. This may have passed us, but many African-Americans are still dealing with racial discrimination and this time it’s with the Criminal Justice system in particular, Capital Punishment. There have been intensive studies and evidence coming up showing how race can in fact play a major role when determining if you get a sentence to Capital Punishment or not, even if you are in fact innocent. We are to believe with our Constitution, bill of rights, and laws that every citizen no matter what race you are will be treated equally fair and justice will hopefully be served, but throughout our history up until now we are finding out that ultimately what will decide the outcome of a citizens fair and equal trial is the color of their skin.

[Our] prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today” (Stevenson 33). In America, the number of incarcerated women has increased by 64.6% from the year 1980 to 2010 (Stevenson 233). The presence of the trends has increased government expenditure in prisons and jail whereby the value has increased from $6.9 billion to $80 billion currently and hence establishing a profitable strategy to elevate the number of people in prison (Stevenson 16). It is important to note that there is a huge difference when it comes to the aspects of race whereby the African Americans are subjected to high rates of arrests, conviction, and subjected to the death penalty when compared to the white Americans (Stevenson 142). A movement which is identified as “Black Lives Matter” began recently as a way of demonstrating about the deaths of young African American men who were shot by the police while unarmed. The African Americans perceived the killing as a form of discrimination especially since the involved police did not receive any form of punishment (Taylor 41). Let me inform you about a man referred to as Anthony Ray Hinton. “Mr. Hinton became the 152nd person in American exonerated and proved innocent after having been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death” (Stevenson 315). He was sentenced in 1985 despite the evidence in 2000 from a DNA test that indicated that he was innocent. The prosecutors declined to review his case until they received orders from the Supreme Court to revisit the case in the year 2015. Hinton had been in prison for about thirty years where he served a death row inmate in

It is shown that “African-Americans make up 22% of North Carolina’s population, but 53% of inmates on the state’s death row.” (Servatius) Although there is not an abundance of African-Americans in the state of North Carolina, half of the state’s death row being filled with them, supporting the idea that African-Americans are discriminated against on trial. The fact that a victim’s race influences the amount of justice they qualify for is an abomination not only to society, but exhibiting how biased the government can possibly be towards a race. (Servatius) Additionally, in a recent experiment done by Tara Servatius, she found that the governor of North Carolina, Bev Perdue, attempted to avoid her question when asked if a lower standard of justice for entire victim classes based on their sex or race was an acceptable outcome from the bill she had just signed. From this astonishing answer, not only does it show that the government is withholding information from society, but it conclusively shows that the legislation is racially biased in death penalty convictions

A law professor from the University of Iowa, David C. Baldus and two colleagues published a study not long after the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 (Dow, 2011). In this study it looked at over 2,000 homicide cases just within Georgia alone beginning in 1972, what they found was startling (Dow, 2011). Baldus found that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely to be given the death penalty than white defendants and those who murdered white victims were actually 4.3 times more apt to be

PHILADELPHIA – The death penalty has been controversial issue in the United States since the 1976 Supreme Court case that legalized it. Since the death penalty was ruled constitutional, the debate on whether race affects the courts decision has been in major debate. In 1998, the Death Penalty Information Center published The Death Penalty in Black and White which examined the death penalty sentences for 667 murder convictions between 1983 and 1993 in Philadelphia courts. The findings of the study present that there could be a relationship between the race of the defendant, race of their victim, and in the death penalty sentence.

Despite the fact that African Americans make up to just over thirteen percent of the nation’s population, more than forty percent of those currently on the federal death row are African American. Many may say or believe that the justice system is fair or honorable but the truth is that the

Twenty-Two Hours a day inmates spend with no light, and no human contact, locked in a small cell the size of a parking spot, how long could you keep your sanity? Out of 900 killers sentenced to death row since 1978, only thirteen of them have been executed, says Sarah Kaufman in the article Death Row Phenomenon. As a result of being an inmate condemned to death row, many inmates experience emotional distress, as well as Death Row Syndrome.

When examining more closely, the details about how capital punishment is practiced can also be puzzling. Because there are no perfect beings in this world, the justice system is inalterably flawed; even with the advancing technology, there will never a guarantee on not executing the innocent if capital punishment is not abolished. For instance, even though the Court had prohibited the sentencing of an offender to death such that race and class dominate an important part to the consideration of the verdict, racial discrimination still occurs frequently in the capital punishment system. Black jurors, black defendants, and black victims are significantly deprived. It is much more probable for a black defendant to be executed over a white defendant;

Although roughly thirty six people are executed each year, it is safe to assume that around eighty percent of those people put to death had killed a white victim. Because of this, the death penalty is discriminatory. The poor and minorities, especially African Americans, are the groups who get the metaphoric “short end of the stick.” Studies have shown that black defendants with less evidence against them than a white person who had committed the same crime were more likely to be sentenced to death. Black defendants are also more likely to be sentenced to death than a person of another race who had committed the same crime. An additional study showed that black defendants were almost three times as likely to get a death penalty sentence than

Capital Punishment In The United States is influenced a lot by race. I will talk about the extent to which race is a problem in cases of the death penalty. The question I always ask myself is why statistics say that most crime is caused by Blacks or Latinos. Is that even true? Why are Blacks and Latinos accused and convicted of crimes more often than Whites and Asians? I will relate this project to the story “Like a Winding Sheet”, by Ann Petry.