Does your race and income matter if you face the death penalty?
By Guest Contributor ishita, originally published at Restore Fairness
This post elaborates on the excerpt we ran last week about David Dow.
It is no secret that our country’s criminal justice system has consistently proven to be biased against minority communities of color. Statistics published by the NAACP show that even amongst those found guilty of crimes, African-Americans continue to be disproportionately sentenced to life in prison, face higher drug sentences, and are executed at higher rates when compared to people of other races. Michelle Alexander speaks of a “color-coded caste system” in The New Jim Crow that marginalized communities who encounter the criminal justice system.
Seasoned Texas attorney David R. Dow’s new book The Autobiography of an Execution provides an exploration of the death penalty, written through the eyes of a man who has spent 20 years defending over a hundred death-row inmates, most of whom died, and most of whom were guilty. As the head litigator for the Texas Defender Service, a non profit legal aid organization in the state that boasts the highest number of executions since 1976, Dow presents a powerful argument against the death penalty system. Candidly exploring how he balances such a trying job with being a good father and husband, Dow’s extremely personal book only works to strengthen the argument that the broken criminal justice system operates on a vicious cycle based on racial and economic disparity.
In his book, Dow opposes the unequal basis on which some criminals are sentenced to be executed while others aren’t, and deems the criminal justice system “racist, classist (and) unprincipled.” He opposes the death penalty as a flawed and unjust facet of the criminal justice system. Based on his experience, he notes that while he believes that a majority of the clients he represented were, in fact, guilty, there was very little separating those criminals from others who were guilty of the same crime, other than “the operation of what I consider to be insidious types of prejudice.” Most unsettling is his severe mistrust of members of the justice system – police officers, prosecutors and judges – whom he believes would “violate their oaths of office” and put men and women on death row who they think “deserve to be there”.
In Dow’s exploration of the politics behind the death penalty, perhaps the most tenacious argument against it is the blatant way that the intersections of race and class influence the outcome of a criminal case. Dow says,
…if you’re going to commit murder, you want to be white, and you want to be wealthy — so that you can hire a first-class lawyer — and you want to kill a black person. And if [you are], the odds of your being sentenced to death are basically zero…It’s one thing to say that rich people should be able to drive Ferraris and poor people should have to take the bus. It’s very different to say that rich people should get treated one way by the state’s criminal-justice system and poor people should get treated another way. But that is the system that we have.
Photo courtesy of chicagotribune.com
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Political Pete wrote:
I watched the documentary. It was a unique perspective. Particularly, no one measures the psychic harm of the guards, switch pullers who actually establish a long term relationship with the inmates. However, if you want to know about race and biasness in the death penalty, it was articulated in McCleskey v. Kemp.
This was a devastating case.
The supreme court acknowledged racial bias within the death penalty.
The court’s response:
“…disparities in sentencing are []inevitable…”
This case was a close 5-4 vote. The dissenting opinion mocked the majority for being afraid of too much justice.
The court feared if they acknowledge race and bias in the death penalty, then litigation would flood the courts . . . it would ruin and be too large of a burden for the court to live up to because of legal precedent.
It would force the court to acknowledge ALL BIAS in the criminal justice system, not just in the context of the death penalty. Unfortunately, 5 out of 4 of our justice was not ready for that type of honesty.
Posted 08 Mar 2010 at 10:58 am ¶
Lu wrote:
Kemp was indeed a devastating case, particularly in relation to Washington v. Davis. If you cannot prove an intent to discriminate (and how, mind you, do you get inside someone’s head and locate their “intent to be racist button?) you can never sustain a discrimination claim based on disparities. So even if you are five or ten times more likely to be executed if you are Black, there is no reprise unless you can prove the state or federal government intended it to be that way. It is a sick system, and there is little hope of it changing with the congress and court we currently have.
Posted 08 Mar 2010 at 11:39 am ¶
khia213 wrote:
The disparity starts with the prosecutor. The decision to charge a crime as a capital case, rests with that person, who is usually a white male holding an elective office. The need to be re-elected influences the decision, as does the makeup of the community. The community and the selection process for jurors is also a large factor in the sentencing. And the fact that judges, who are for the most part, elected officials, doesn’t help. Rare is the judge who will overturn a faulty death sentence imposed by a jury.
Money, race and the race of the victim are all a part of this unjust and defective system.
Posted 08 Mar 2010 at 1:00 pm ¶
PatrickInBeijing wrote:
Sadly, this is nothing new. I worked against the death penalty more than 30 years ago, and it wasn’t new then.
Sadly, there is little evidence that most white folks in America give a damn. Total props to all the folks who fight this continuing injustice. It is a stain on the American Flag.
Posted 10 Mar 2010 at 7:58 am ¶