As part of a broader reexamination of the death penalty in modern America, a substantial body of evidence has accumulated in recent years suggesting that the ultimate punishment is applied unevenly along racial lines. The social ramifications of the conclusion many are reaching have sweeping and profound consequences for a criminal justice system striving to be racially just and tolerant.

Texan Scandal
The debate over racial qualifications under the death penalty erupted when, during the 2000 presidential campaign, the United States Supreme Court overturned Argentinean Victor Hugo Saldano’s execution because an expert witness for the state testified that race was a factor jurors should consider when contemplating the death penalty. The witness, psychologist Walter Quijano, testified that blacks and Hispanics were overrepresented in the prison population, and prosecutors told jurors they should consider Saldano’s Hispanic ethnicity when decided where he should be given life imprisonment or the death penalty. After Saldano’s conviction, a state review found eight more capital murder cases in which race was made an issue by Quijano and prosecutors. At the time of the campaign, Texas had executed 218 people since 1982, far more than any other state, including 131 under Bush’s governorship since 1995.

Injustice in the City of Brotherly Love
Race as a factor in capital punishment cases is not, however popularly believed, confined to the South. Philadelphia’s death row of 135 men and women is larger that that of 42 states. Ninety percent of Philadelphia’s death row is racial or ethnic minorities. According to Pennsylvania’s own Department of Corrections, Philadelphia’s African-American to European-American ratio of death row inmates is 8.69:1; that’s nearly eleven times worse than Department of Justice figures for death rows across the South.

Some of the most damning evidence of Philadelphia’s racially unjust death row comes from Professors David Baldus and George Woodworth, writing in the Cornell Law Review in 1998. Using the same analytic and statistical methodology used in public health studies, they found race is statistically more likely to affect death sentencing than smoking is to affect the likelihood of a heart attack. Also found was that black defendants are four times for likely to be sentenced to death than non-blacks charged with similar crimes, and killers of black victims are less likely to be sentenced to death than killers of non-black victims.

An Open Debate
Clearly, serious questions remain to be answered regarding the racial justice of capital punishment cases. In New York, when a murder victim is white, a defendant’s chance of facing the death penalty increases by 63%. Similar statistics exist around the entire country, major urban centers in particular. What reforms await death penalty sentencing as a result of surfacing information about racial injustices is unclear. The debate, however, shall surely continue.