Race | Death Penalty Information Center

Overview

The death penal­ty has long come under scruti­ny for being racial­ly biased. Earlier in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry when it was applied for the crime of rape, 89 per­cent of the exe­cu­tions involved black defen­dants, most for the rape of a white woman. In the mod­ern era, when exe­cu­tions have been car­ried out exclu­sive­ly for mur­der, 75 per­cent of the cas­es involve the mur­der of white vic­tims, even though about half of all homi­cide vic­tims in America are black.

A bias towards white-vic­tim cas­es has been found in almost all of the sophis­ti­cat­ed stud­ies explor­ing this area over many years. These stud­ies typ­i­cal­ly con­trol for oth­er vari­ables in the cas­es stud­ied, such as the num­ber of vic­tims or the bru­tal­i­ty of the crime, and still found that defen­dants were more like­ly to be sen­tenced to death if they killed a white person.

The issue of racial dis­par­i­ties in the use of the death penal­ty was con­sid­ered by the Supreme Court in 1987. In a close vote, the Court held that stud­ies alone could not pro­vide the required proof of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in a par­tic­u­lar defendant’s case. This deci­sion appeared to close the door to broad chal­lenges to the death penal­ty. However, the Court has found racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in the selec­tion of the jury in indi­vid­ual cap­i­tal cas­es.
 

At Issue

Today there is grow­ing evi­dence that racial bias con­tin­ues in soci­ety, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The exis­tence of implic­it racial bias among some law enforce­ment offi­cers, wit­ness­es, jurors, and oth­ers allows harsh­er pun­ish­ment of minori­ties, even with­out legal sanc­tion or inten­tion. Although these prej­u­dices are hard to uproot, the unfair appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty could be halt­ed by elim­i­nat­ing that sen­tenc­ing option altogether.

What DPIC Offers 

DPIC tracks the race of those on death row, those who have been exe­cut­ed, the vic­tims in the under­ly­ing crime, and many relat­ed sta­tis­tics. It col­lects the sophis­ti­cat­ed stud­ies on racial bias that have been pub­lished over many years. Many of DPIC’s reports focus on aspects of this ques­tion and some are devot­ed entire­ly to the issue of race.