Racial Disparities Persist in Capital Punishment System
Approximately every 41 of 100
Approximately every 75 of 100
Defendants are black
Victims are white
Studies have found that those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks.
While white people have made up the majority of those executed since 1976, there has been a disproportionate number of black people that were executed (41 percent were executed, while being only 13 percent of the population).
According to Baldus, a renowned pioneer in capital punishment research, the race of the defendant does not predict the likelihood of a death sentence but the race of the victim does.
In fact, defendants that killed white people were
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more likely to be given a death sentence than killers of Black people.
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Executions for Interracial Murders
Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, there have been 294 cases where black defendants were executed for murders involving only white victims, while only 21 white defendants were executed for murders in which only black victims were killed.
WHITE DEFENDANT
/
BLACK VICTIM
(21)
BLACK DEFENDANT
/
WHITE VICTIM
(294)
Capital punishment in the US has been at a steady decline for years, but racial disparities are still prominent in all aspects of the judicial system - and the death penalty is no different. A DCIP analysis stated that, "Studies have consistently found racial disparities at nearly every stage of the capital punishment process, from policingand charging practices, to jury selection, to jury verdicts, to which cases result in executions. Those patterns of discriminatory sentencing and executions — and particularly race-of-victim effects — were evident once again in 2019."
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Overall, statistics show that there is an increasing concentration in minority deaths.
Note: Capital punishment data is only relevant before the year 2020 when considering general trends. The pandemic stopped trials (federal government executions being the exclusion) and greatly impacted the death penalty process, both socially and legally.