This week, our allies at the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) released “Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the Death Penalty System.” For the ever-growing number of people who pay attention to justice issues, that blunt subtitle does not come as a shock.
That doesn’t make this report — written by Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s senior director of research and special projects — any less vital as we seek to transform a racist justice system.
The statistics around the death penalty’s racism remain steady. To name just one, the murder of a white person is far more likely to lead to a death sentence than the murder of a Black person. Seventy-five percent of the cases on our nation’s death rows involve white victims, even though more than half of all homicide victims are non-white. The message about whose lives matter in the eyes of the legal system couldn’t be clearer.
This reality is a natural extension of how we got our modern death penalty system: our notorious legacy of slavery and lynchings. “Enduring Justice” includes a deeply reported history of the evolution from lynchings to executions. That section includes two graphics, maps of the U.S. One shows the distribution of lynchings, the other shows the distribution of executions of Black people. The similarity of the two graphics is staggering.
What’s clear is that, like slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation before it, the modern death penalty is used as an instrument of social control, particularly a tool for controlling the Black population. And it’s all done under the guise of public safety.
But the reality is, the death penalty has been deeply harmful to the communities that still use it. It is the most extreme and egregious response to violence, and yet violence flourishes at higher rates in the places that actively seek it. The death penalty wastes a huge amount of resources, which stands in the way of community-led violence reduction strategies that are actually proven to make communities safer and can liberate Black and Brown communities from the devastating effects of over-policing, mass incarceration, and executions.
In the wake of violence, communities need safety, healing, and accountability that repairs harm for everyone impacted. That’s true justice. The death penalty ignores every one of those needs.
Please read this report. We cannot transform our justice system without ending the racist death penalty.
