How Geography and Race Influence the Death Penalty

We envision a justice system that delivers healing, safety, and accountability that repairs harm to everyone affected by violence. Today's justice system fails to deliver these outcomes and is anchored in racism and inequality. The death penalty exacerbates these problems to the highest degree.

Geographic Injustice

• The majority of death sentences come from just 34 of the country's 3,143 (1.1%).¹ Whether a person lives or dies often relies on the preference of prosecutors and judges in their area rather than what they’ve done.
• A person could be sentenced to 40 years in prison in one county and receive the death penalty for the exact same crime in the next county over.
• Just seven counties produced five or more death sentences between 2016-2021. In 2017, California’s Riverside County sent more people to death row than every other state in the country except for California.²

Biased and Arbitrary

• Individual prosecutors decide when to seek the death penalty. But the definition of "death eligible" is so broad that there is little guidance for prosecutors to make that decision, leaving room for bias and other factors to influence the decision-making process.
• Wealth and poverty dictate who receives a death sentence.³ Individuals charged with murder who have access to money can afford better legal teams, which often negotiate deals. Meanwhile, approximately 90% of those on death row could not afford to hire a lawyer when they were tried.⁴
• People from low-income backgrounds are more likely to receive death sentences for less severe crimes compared to those who can hire better lawyers. Impoverished people are executed for robberies "gone wrong," for murders that were not premeditated, and for being at the scene of a murder that they did not commit themselves.

The Role of Racism

• Studies show that states with a greater history of lynchings also tend to have more modern death sentences, and that the link is even stronger between lynchings and death sentences imposed on Black people.⁵
• The race of the victim has a profound effect on which crimes receive the death penalty. About 75% of death penalty cases involve the murder of white victims, even though about half of all homicide victims in the United States are Black.⁶
• Sophisticated studies in states as diverse as California, Ohio, and Georgia have found that people convicted of murdering a white victim were many times more people convicted of killing a person of color.⁷
• Eyewitness identification — the leading cause of wrongful conviction⁸ — is even less reliable when the witness is identifying someone of a different race.⁹

Jury Exclusion and Biased Verdicts

• People who oppose the death penalty are excluded from serving on capital juries. Studies have shown that that those people selected for juries, who are open to the death penalty, are more likely to favor a guilty verdict, raising the risk of wrongful convictions.¹¹
• Prosecutors have taken pains to remove Black jurors from murder cases, even though it is illegal. Prosecutors in states like Pennsylvania and Texas have even been trained in how to remove Black jurors and get away with it.¹²
• In some communities, race-based exclusion from juries is extreme. For example, in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 Black jurors have been struck by prosecutors from death penalty cases.¹³

Fairness in the death penalty is a moving target at best. More often than not, fairness doesn't exist. Reforming the death penalty has only made it more complex, more confusing, and more expensive — not more fair. It is time to end it.