Charlotte Observer - Published Thursday, April 19, 2001

Death penalty bias

Study shows link between race and death penalty

For years, prosecutors have dismissed suggestions that there's a link between the race of a murderer and the chance of getting the death penalty. Recent studies dispel this contention.

Researchers in an exhaustive academic study of homicides in North Carolina have found a high correlation between the race of victims and the likelihood of a death sentence. In short, those who murder white people are much more likely to get the death penalty than those who murder nonwhites - more than three times as likely, in fact.

What's more, the study also suggests that the death sentencing rate is even higher when minorities kill white people, and lower when minorities kill other minorities. Thus race clearly is an underlying factor in deciding who gets executed and who gets life in prison.

These findings will be a bitter pill to swallow for those who have long believed that the application of the death penalty in North Carolina has been a color-blind process. The law itself may be as color-blind as possible, but the study shows that juries take note of racial considerations. "This is not colorblind," says a UNC law professor who worked on the study. "This is a system that is color-conscious."

The findings mirror what the Observer found last year in a larger study of the application of the death penalty in the Carolinas. That series found that black defendants who kill whites are three times more likely to face execution - evidence that justifies a moratorium on the death penalty until state officials can determine if there is a way to apply capital punishment in a fair and even-handed manner without racial bias.

The Observer study, and the study results announced Monday by The Common Sense Foundation and the N.C. Council of Churches, suggests the difficulty in ensuring that race is not a factor in deciding which defendants get life and which defendants die. The studies also put into sharper focus three important bills involving the death penalty: a two-year moratorium to allow for a study on its application; a Senate bill to prohibit the execution of the mentally retarded; and a racial justice bill that seeks to eliminate race as a factor in death penalty decisions by allowing defendants to present evidence of discrimination.

These troubling studies on the death penalty suggest that despite good-faith efforts by legislators and law enforcement officials to keep racial considerations out of the system, race continues to be a factor in determining life or death for those convicted of society's worse crimes.

Legislators must take the time to absorb the latest results - and reflect upon whether they wish to condone a flawed system built on racial discrimination.

OG Note: But nowhere in this report is there any mention of the prior record of those who got the death penalty. Someone with no record who kills her husband in a fit of rage after finding him in bed with another woman is not as likely to get the death penalty as someone who has a string of violent crimes and homilcides on file and bludgeons a retired librarian to death for the $10 in her purse. Similarly, someone who shoots a rival gang member in a shootout is not as likely to get the death penalty as someone who runs over and kills a police officer in the process of fleeing a shoplifting.

The fact remains that 80 percent of all violent crime is committed by blacks and 80% of that 80% is black on black.

-- Anonymous, April 19, 2001