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The death penalty has long come under scrutiny for being racially biased. Earlier in the twentieth century when it was applied for the crime of rape, 89 percent of the executions involved black defendants, most for the rape of a white woman.
Race and the Death Penalty by the Numbers. More than 75% of death row defendants who have been executed were sentenced to death for killing white victims, even though in society as a whole about half* of all homicide victims are African American.
The death penalty has always been, and continues to be, disproportionately wielded against Black people and other people of color. Disparities in the makeup of the death row population are clear: Black and Hispanic people represent 31% of the U.S. population, but 53% of death row inmates—41.9% and 11.3% respectively ( American Progress, 2019 ).
Studies consistently show that African American defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty, particularly when the victims are white. This racial bias extends to the jury selection process, where the underrepresentation of minorities can skew the trial’s dynamics.
The color of a defendant and victim's skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America. People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Black people have been overrepresented on death rows across the United States and killers of Black people are less likely to face the death penalty than people who kill white people, a new report found.
Studies have consistently found racial disparities at nearly every stage of the capital punishment process, from policing and charging practices, to jury selection, to jury verdicts, to which cases result in executions.
Race plays a decisive role in who lives and who dies in the United States. But these racial inequities are nothing new. From slavery to Jim Crow to the present day, the death penalty has been a tool of injustice and discrimination.
Nationally, the racial composition of those on death row is 45% white, 42% black, and 10% Latino/ Latina. Of states with more than 10 people on death row, Texas (70%) and Pennsylvania (69%) have the largest percentage of minorities on death row.
WASHINGTON — As activists push President Joe Biden to commute existing federal death sentences during his final months in office, a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center examined what it called persistent racial disparities in federal death penalty prosecutions. The report found that since 1989, nearly three in four defendants ...