A team of Iowa researchers analyzed a decade of Philadelphia murders to compare the sentences blacks and whites received for the same or similar crimes. Guess what they found? No surprises.
In keeping with time-tested American traditions, black defendants were 38 percent more likely to be sentenced to die than others who committed similar crimes, according to a study by University of Iowa Law School researchers David Baldus and George Woodworth. Their research team analyzed 667 murders that occurred in Philadelphia from 1983 to 1993. Of the 520 cases involving black defendants, 95 were sentenced to die, while 19 of the 147 non-black defendants received the death penalty.
Nationally, 1,420 of the 3,387 people on death row are black, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Researchers have yet to conduct a similarly thorough and complicated study nationwide, but many local anecdotes over the years offer an alarmingly lopsided picture of death penalty enforcement, with the heaviest weight falling on black defendants.
Baldus, for example, conducted a similar study in the mid-1980s that showed the killers of whites were far more likely to receive the death penalty than the killers of blacks. The study became part of a death-penalty challenge that reached the Supreme Court. In 1987, the high court accepted the statistics but rejected the argument that even when the statistics clearly showed Georgia’s death-penalty enforcement to be unfair to blacks, statistics were not enough to prove that race was an issue in individual cases.
Richard Dieter, of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based group against the death penalty which commissioned the Baldus study, says the death penalty more often is sought for black defendants, especially in cases where the victims are white. In addition, black jurors are “systematically barred from service.” he says.
Lynne Abraham, Philadelphia’s district attorney, denies discrimination by her office or the law, which she describes as “gender and racially neutral.” Prosecutors, she notes, can only seek the death penalty when they have aggravating circumstances and all such decisions are “fact specific.”
OK. But what are the facts? Abraham significantly benefited from disclosure of a 10-year-old training tape during last year’s district attorney’s race in Philadelphia. In it, her Republican opponent, Jack McMahon, is seen advising young prosecutors to try to keep “blacks from low-income areas” off juries.
“The blacks from low-income areas are less likely to convict,” McMahon said on the tape. “I understand that. It’s an understandable proposition. There’s a resentment for law enforcement. There’s a resentment for authority. And as a result, you don’t want those people on your jury. “And it may appear as if you’re being racist, but again, you’re just being realistic. You’re just trying to win the case. The other side is doing the same thing.”
Racist or realistic? Or both?
When we see statistics like those Baldus produced, then see them confirmed and ignored by the Supreme Court, it is a little bit easier to see why the criminal justice system has so much less credibility among so many African-Americans.
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The law may be color-blind as it is written, but not as it is enforced. Twice in recent years the House, but not the Senate, has passed a Racial Justice Act. Intended to close the loophole opened by the Supreme Court, the bill would allow challenges to death sentences based on patterns of discrimination such as those Baldus has shown.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, under the urgings of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, has been closing off avenues for appeal of death sentences. It’s not racial, the justices insist. They’re just being realistic.
Right. Still, I wonder how the court would react if whites were more likely to go to death row than blacks. I wonder if the wheels of justice would turn more swiftly.