Countless studies have undeniably shown that the odds of a person being sentenced to death are much higher if the defendant is a minority and the victim is white. In Georgia, an extensive 7 year study concluded that there is a staggering 4.3 times higher probability of getting the death penalty for murdering a white victim, than if the crimes were very similar, but the victim was black. In Mississippi, a similar, comparable study showed that a minority is as much as 5.5 times more likely to get the death penalty for murdering a white victim. Is this to say that a white person’s life has more value than a black person’s? That the punishment should be more severe for someone because of the color of the skin of the person that was killed? In the United States black men make up 47% of the people on death row, but only 6% of the total population. Conclude from this what you will.
There are multiple imperfections that contribute to the persistent problem of racism in the justice system. One of these factors is the small number of black district attorneys practicing in the main death penalty states. The figure to the right shows the extent to which minorities are under represented in this aspect of the justice system. Fair and accurate representation is imperative for the equal treatment of individuals.
The Department of Justice states that nearly 80% (of the people on death row waiting execution are minorities, and they also make up 74% of the cases where the federal prosecutors seek the death penalty. However it was NOT concluded that their crimes were statistically worse than the total amount of crimes committed. The system is unjust and it is unjust at every level. Blacks are discriminated against at every stage of the judicial process, from the police officers, to the judges in the court room, to the twelve person jury with one or two minorities. One main level of the system that needs to have immediate attention is the role of the prosecutor. This is perhaps the most important level when analyzing the problem of racial biases because this is where it is decided what sentence will be sought for the defendant. This is where the prosecutor decides whether or not to seek the death penalty. This is where it seems to be anything other than advantageous to be a minority.
In 1972 the courts realized that there were devastating flaws in the justice system and called for a moratorium on all executions until the system could be rectified. The reason for this drastic action was the realization that the death penalty was being dealt out in an arbitrary fashion. There were no definitive stipulations on who should receive the death penalty and it depended too much on chance and luck. Spotlighted problems included the statistic that prior to this moratorium 87% of the people sentenced to death for the crime of rape where black men with white victims. Also 100% of the people convicted of rape where charged with raping a white woman. No person who was sentenced to death was done so because they raped someone of color. Add to this the statistic that states that black women are 3 times as likely to be the victim of sexual assault and you find yourself in a conundrum. How can this be? It’s surely not that black women aren’t being raped, it’s that African Americans are being discriminated against. It seems as though the justice system does not value them as highly as they do whites.
Half of the people currently on death row waiting to die are black, 85% of them are there for killing someone who is white. This is not proportional with the number of blacks who have been killed. African Americans do not make up only 15% of the deaths. Since the first death sentence ruling there have been a total of approximately 18,000 executions in the United States, only 37 of those people were convicted of killing someone of color. Another truly astounding study I came upon dealt with the statistics of the death row inmates in the deep south of Alabama. The statistic said that “Although only 6% of all murders in Alabama are black-on-white, 60% of the black inmates on Alabama's death row are there for killing whites.” I can see no other explanation for this other than racism. I’m open to hearing any rationalization that you think of, but for me it appears to be blatant discrimination.
Statistically there is evidence to support the idea that the institution of the death penalty is not fair or just—that it is racist. People argue that it is not, that more blacks are sentenced to death because though they are only 14% of the population they commit more than 14% of the crimes. And while this is true, the proportions still do not add up, proportionally more blacks are given the death penalty. While I am against every aspect of the death penalty, I know that some of you are not, but my hope is that all of you are against racism; that you can see that the very heart of the death penalty is malevolent.
8 comments:
It is sad that even today racism exists in society after countless years of trying to get rid of it. A majority of the people on death row should not be minorities. Underlying this fact is why don't white people get sentenced to death as much. Is it because lawyers do not pursue the death penalty as hard, the jury thinks the man does not deserve the death penalty or is it because the man is innocent. There are many things with the death penalty that are wrong, especially the costs and I think it needs to be taken away. Racism should be dead but it is still kicking in the justice system, a system in which all decisions are supposed to be unbiased.
It is truly a tragedy that racism to this extent exists today. However, who can really be blamed? Every up has it down, every action its reaction, for every person who embraces their race or culture as such a positive and beautiful thing, there is a person who looks at it as a sinful disgusting difference. It is sad that so many people pay with their life in such a flawed system but when looked at closely, it can be seen as natures cruel sense of humor.
I personally do not agree with the death penalty either. However, we have to ask, what else could we do? It is easy to sit from our outside observer's perspective and continually protest and critique the status quo, but at least in my experience, a better alternative has not been proposed. And also, I think the focus on racism should extend to all crime, and not just the death penalty. While death is the ultimate sacrifice, wasting away in jail is not the best way to spend one's life either. I cannot locate a source for this, but I am pretty sure that it was recently supported that a hispanic or black male was more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. I am not positive if this is correct, but the fact that there could be any shred of truth in this statement is appalling in itself. We need to find a way to fix the racism throughout all facets of public life, not limited to the death penalty.
There is a lot of deception on the anti death penalty side, with regard to race and odds or multipliers. Even more so, are people like Lauren, who are simply ignorant of this deception and fail to fact check anti death penalty claims.
These two articles, below, may help to raise the fog a bit.
Race & the Death Penalty: How numbers are tricking you
forwarded by Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters, contact info below
Los Angeles Times
July 12, 1998
The Math Behind Race, Crime and Sentencing Statistics
By John Allen Paulos
Philadelphia
Who can forget the morass of statistics used in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial? What did the cited DNA probabilities mean? Did the jury and the public grasp the mathematics undergirding the numbers?
More recently, the issues of race, death and mathematics have again subtly entertwined. This time, the misunderstanding arises because the technical meaning of a common phrase differs substantially from its informal meaning. What at first glance may seem like semantic nitpicking has significant consequences for public policy and perceptions.
In a study published in The Times, there appeared a potentially inflammatory, although ostensibly correct, statement. In reporting on death sentences in Philadelphia, the study asserted that the odds of blacks convicted of murder receiving a death sentence were four times the odds faced by other defendants similarly convicted. The Times article, as well as accounts in other newspapers, then transmuted that statement into the starkly inequivalent one that blacks were four times as likely to be sentenced to death as whites. The author of the study used the technical definition of odds, not the more familiar idea of probability and, as a consequence, most readers were seriously misled.
The difference between "probability" and "odds" is crucial. The odds of an event is defined as the probability it will occur divided by the probability that it will not occur. Consider a coin flip. The probability of it landing heads is one-half, or .5, and the probability of not landing heads is also one-half, or .5. Hence: The odds of the coin landing heads is 1 to 1 (.5 divided by .5). Now consider rolling a die and having it land on 1,2,3,4 or 5. The probability of this event is five-sixths, or .83, and the probability of the die not landing on 1,2,3,4 or 5 is one-sixth, or .17. Hence: The odds of the die landing on one of these five numbers is 5 to 1 (.83 divided by .17). More serious discrepancies between probabilities and odds occur for events with higher probabilities.
What's the relevance of this to murder statistics and death penalties? To most readers, the phrase "four times the odds" means that if, say, 99% of blacks convicted of murder were to receive the death penalty, about 25% of whites similarly convicted would receive the same penalty.
Yet, when the technical definition of "odds" is used, the meaning is quite different. In this case, if 99% of blacks convicted of murder received the death penalty, then a considerably less unfair 96% of whites similarly convicted would receive the death penalty. Why? Using the technical definition, we find that the odds in favor of a convicted black murderer receiving the death penalty are 99 to 1 (99/l00 divided by 1/100). The odds in favor of a convicted nonblack murderer getting death are 24 to 1 (96/l00 divided by 4/100). Thus, since 99 is roughly four times 24, the odds that a convicted black murderer will receive the death penalty are, in this case, approximately four times the odds that a convicted nonblack murderer will receive the same sentence.
As Arnold Barnett and others have shown, similarly misleading claims were made in the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision in McClesky vs. Kemp. The issue concerned the effect of a murder victim's race on death sentencing in the state of Georgia, but the confusion is the same.
By dissecting the phrase "four times the odds," I don't mean to deny that racism exists, that there are racial disparities in sentencing or that the death penalty is morally wrong. Rather, I mean to deflate the likely-to-be-inferred magnitude of racial disparities in the sentencing for murder and other violent crimes. The difference between 99% and 96%, for example, is much less egregious than that between 99% and 25%. Still, whatever they are, the raw percentages are troubling enough without the tendentious and easily misinterpreted phrase "four times the odds."
John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is the author of "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" and the forthcoming "Once Upon a Number."
Webpage http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/
email paulos@temple.edu
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How numbers are tricking you
by Arnold Barnett
MIT Technology Review October, 1994
The statistics that fill the media are often subtly misleading. Here's a guide to the most common types of errror.
www(dot)geocities.com/CapitolHill/4834/barnett.htm
NOTE: I have removed most of this article and only retained the section on the death penalty - Dudley
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Fundamental misunderstandings of statistical results can arise when two words or phrases are unwisely viewed as synonyms, or when an analyst applies a particular term inconsistently.
The Odds of Execution
A powerful example of the first problem arose in 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its controversial McClesky v. Kemp ruling concerning racial discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty. The Court was presented with an extensive study of Georgia death sentencing, the main finding of which was explained by the New York Times as follows: "Other things being as equal as statisticians can make them, someone who killed a white person in Georgia was four times as likely to receive a death sentence as someone who killed a black."
The Supreme Court understood the study the same way. Its majority opinion noted that "even after taking account of 39 nonracial variables, defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times as likely to receive a death sentence as defendants charged with killing blacks."
But the Supreme Court, the New York Times, and countless other newspapers and commentators were laboring under a major misconception. In fact, the statistical study in McClesky v. Kemp never reached the "factor of four" conclusion so widely attributed to it. What the analyst did conclude was that the odds of a death sentence in a white-victim case were 4.3 times the odds in a black-victim case. The difference between "likelihood" and "odds" (defined as the likelihood that an event will happen divided by the likelihood that it will not) might seem like a semantic quibble, but it is of major importance in understanding the results.
The likelihood, or probability, of drawing a diamond from a deck of cards, for instance, is 1 in 4, or 0.25. The odds are, by definition, 0.25/0.75, or 0.33. Now consider the likelihood of drawing any red card (heart or diamond) from the deck. This probability is 0.5, which corresponds to an odds ratio of 0.5/0.5, or 1.0. In other words, a doubling of probability from 0.25 to 0.5 results in a tripling of the odds.
The death penalty analysis suffered from a similar, but much more serious, distortion. Consider an extremely aggravated homicide, such as the torture and killing of a kidnapped stranger by a prison escapee. Represent as PW the probability that a guilty defendant would be sentenced to death if the victim were white, and as PB the probability that the defendant would receive the death sentence if the victim were black. Under the "4.3 times as likely" interpretation of the study, the two values would be related by the equation:
If, in this extreme killing, the probability of a death sentence is very high, such that PW = 0.99 (that is, 99 percent), then it would follow that PB = 0.99/4.3 = 0.23. In other words, even the hideous murder of a black would be unlikely to evoke a death sentence. Such a disparity would rightly be considered extremely troubling.
But under the "4.3 times the odds" rule that reflects the study's actual findings, the discrepancy between PW and PB would be far less alarming. This yields the equation:
If PW = 0.99, the odds ratio in a white-victim case is 0.99/0.01; in other words, a death sentence is 99 times as likely as the alternative. But even after being cut by a factor of 4.3, the odds ratio in the case of a black victim would take the revised value of 99/4.3 = 23, meaning that the perpetrator would be 23 times as likely as not to be sentenced to death. That is:
Work out the algebra and you find that PB = 0.96. In other words, while a death sentence is almost inevitable when the murder victim is white, it is also so when the victim is black - a result that few readers of the "four times as likely" statistic would infer. While not all Georgia killings are so aggravated that PW = 0.99, the quoted study found that the heavy majority of capital verdicts came up in circumstances when PW, and thus PB, is very high.
None of this is to deny that there is some evidence of race-of-victim disparity in sentencing. The point is that the improper interchange of two apparently similar words greatly exaggerated the general understanding of the degree of disparity. Blame for the confusion should presumably be shared by the judges and the journalists who made the mistake and the researchers who did too little to prevent it.
(Despite its uncritical acceptance of an overstated racial disparity, the Supreme Court's McClesky v. Kemp decision upheld Georgia's death penalty. The court concluded that a defendant must show race prejudice in his or her own case to have the death sentence countermanded as discriminatory.)
webpage http://sloancf.mit.edu/vpf/popup-if.cfm?in_spseqno=5&co_list=F
email abarnett@mit.edu
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com, 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas
Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O'Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.
A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.
Pro death penalty sites
homicidesurvivors(dot)com/categories/Dudley%20Sharp%20-%20Justice%20Matters.aspx
www(dot)dpinfo.com
www(dot)cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPinformation.htm
www(dot)clarkprosecutor.org/html/links/dplinks.htm
joshmarquis(dot)blogspot.com/
www(dot)lexingtonprosecutor.com/death_penalty_debate.htm
www(dot)prodeathpenalty.com
www(dot)yesdeathpenalty.com/deathpenalty_co
http://www.yesdeathpenalty.com/deathpenalty_contents.htm
www(dot)wesleylowe.com/cp.html
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RACE & THE DEATH PENALTY: A REBUTTAL TO THE RACISM CLAIMS
http://prodpinnc.blogspot.com/2012/07/rebuttal-death-penalty-racism-claims.html
"There is no race of the offender / victim effect at either the decision to advance a case to penalty hearing or the decision to sentence a defendant to death given a penalty hearing."
"As blacks represent 47% of murderers and whites 37%, we see that whites are twice as likely to be executed for committing murder as are their black counterparts."
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