Similarly, today, there are two death penalty systems in the United States, one minority, one white – separate and unequal. A 2003 Amnesty International report showed that although African-Americans are only 12% of the population of the United States, at that time they were 40% of the people condemned on death row. If this nation is not going to abolish the death penalty, it needs to institute a moratorium until we can figure out why these two death penalty systems have developed and what, if anything, can be done to prevent this clear racial bias from continuing.
There is an abundance of studies which demonstrate that capital punishment suffers from extreme racial bias. A white paper published by the ACLU showed the racism of the federal death penalty. Among other things, it states that people of color were the majority of people who received death sentences in the modern federal death penalty. It also stated that two of the last three people executed in the federal system were people of color, the other being Timothy McVeigh. The issue is not going to resolve itself as the next six people scheduled for federal executions are African-American.
The 2003 Amnesty study found racial bias in the death penalty systems of North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey. The problem cited by Amnesty in most of those states was that defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim was white and that the racial configuration most likely to receive capital punishment is black defendants convicted of killing white victims.
Similar studies have shown the existence of the same racial bias in the death penalty systems of California, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Maryland and North Carolina. An American Sociological Review article from 2007 showed that minorities capitally sentenced for killing white people were more likely to have their sentences carried out than minorities who kill non-whites.One of the authors of the study said, "[w]hite lives are still valued more than black ones when it comes to deciding who gets executed and who does not."
Given the disparities in both the federal and state capital punishment system, it is time to start asking the questions President Johnson posed forty years ago: "what is happening" and "why is it happening?" Until we get satisfactory answers to those questions, we should stop using the death penalty.
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