The Color of North Carolina's Death Penalty

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-07-23 07:05:00 UTC
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It's no secret that in the U.S., you're far more likely to face the death penalty if you're accused of killing someone who's white. In fact, the color of a victim's skin is the single best predictor of whether the accused will be sentenced to death.

Now, out of North Carolina, comes further confirmation of this phenomenon. According to two researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Northeastern University, someone on trial for killing a white person in North Carolina is three times as likely to receive the death penalty than someone accused of killing a black victim.

To arrive at their results, the authors examined over 15,200 homicides that occured between 1980 and 2007. They also factored in a number of other elements, such as the number of victims and whether additional crimes were involved.

This finding has been echoed across numerous studies, including research performed by Uncle Sam. In 1990, the nonpartisan U.S. General Accounting Office likewise found that defendants were several times more likely to be put to death if their murder victim was white (as opposed to black).  Since 1976, nearly 80% of all death row defendants have been executed for murdering white victims — even though blacks make up about half of all related homocide victims.

As we often write here, these kinds of racial disparities creep into the criminal justice system early on — starting in our schools, and in city policing. At trials, such disparities emerge still more starkly. Despite the right to be tried by a jury of your peers, the Equal Justice Initiative reports, many Southern prosecutors are working to keep blacks out of the jury box.  The result? Today, in North Carolina, at least 26 death row prisoners were condemned by all-white juries.

Too often, when it comes to men like Curtis Flowers — who was sentenced to death in 2004 by a nearly all-white jury, even though the county in which the crime occurred is nearly half black — by the time the trial begins, the deck is already stacked.

Photo Credit: szlea

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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