RACIAL BIAS

From policing to charging decisions to jury selection, racial discrimination shapes every stage of a capital case. Black people are more likely to be targeted, more likely to face harsher charges, and less likely to receive the benefit of doubt. The race of the victim matters too. Cases involving white victims are far more likely to result in death sentences than those involving Black victims.

Modern capital punishment is inseparable from the history of racial violence in the South. After the formal end of slavery, white lawmakers and courts replaced explicitly racist sentencing laws with systems that gave broad discretion to all-white juries. The outcome was predictable. White defendants were spared. Black defendants were condemned. Public executions and lynchings coexisted for decades, enforcing racial control through both law and terror.

As lynchings declined, executions became more bureaucratic. The methods changed. The purpose did not. Today’s death penalty carries forward the same racial hierarchy under the guise of legality.

As Harry Blackmun warned, “even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die.” A system rooted in racial violence cannot deliver racial justice. The death penalty must be confronted for what it is, and ultimately, ended.