“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”
According to the most recent edition of Death Row, USA, a quarterly publication from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, 40 percent of America’s 3,009 death row inmates are black, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. In Illinois, with a 15 percent black population, death row is 62 percent black.
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The decision was handed down June 6–in the same month President Clinton began airing a precampaign television commercial in which he proudly takes credit for expanding America’s death penalty to include some 50 new offenses like drive-by murders and violence against “maritime navigation.” Clinton’s message is clear: he’s protecting our rights by executing more of our dangerous criminals. Clinton’s new crime bill expands the death penalty in a manner unprecedented by even his archconservative predecessors; aggressive promotion of the death penalty plays increasingly well in America.
Like South Africa under apartheid rule, every branch of our government is complicit in continuing the racist tradition of capital punishment in America. Our judiciary not only hands down death sentences in a racially disproportionate way, but the Supreme Court has virtually guaranteed that no African-American defendant can ever hope to challenge the constitutionality of the practice. The Court’s notorious 1987 ruling in McCleskey v. Kemp saw to that. Warren McCleskey had been sentenced to death for killing a white police officer during an armed robbery in Fulton County, Georgia. On appeal, his attorneys assembled one of the most comprehensive statistical analyses of racial disparity in capital sentencing, examining the cases of more than 2,000 Georgia defendants convicted of murder or voluntary manslaughter between 1973 and 1979. McCleskey’s attorneys showed that 21 percent of black defendants were sentenced to death when their victims were white, while only 1 percent received the death penalty when their victims were black. Historically, supporters of the death penalty have argued that these numbers reflect that black-on-white crimes are typically more brutal than black-on-black crimes. But even after adjusting their study for 39 nonracial aggravating circumstances (such as whether the murder was committed during a robbery, there were multiple victims, or the defendant had a prior record) the attorneys showed that an African-American defendant was still 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty if his victim was white–and this in the very jurisdiction where McCleskey was sentenced.
South Africa has taken another enlightened step forward while we continue to stumble along in the dark. In upholding the death penalty we count among our like-minded partners in crime such stalwart defenders of human rights as Iran, Iraq, Libya and China. For a nation founded on the rights of the individual, we find ourselves in questionable company.
