Racial Inequity and the Death Penalty

Past and Present

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.

Death Penalty and Slavery

National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, Records of Rights
National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, Records of Rights

  • Discrimination in capital punishment was explicitly written in many states’ laws during slavery. Black people – whether slaves or not – faced the death penalty for crimes that were not even be eligible for death if committed by a white person.
Case in point: In Virginia, before the Civil War, there were over 60 capital crimes for slaves but only one for white people. According to one local account from Virginia, the execution of a white person was so rare as to be a “strange spectacle.”1

The Death Penalty in the Post Civil War Era

  • Lynching peaked in the decades after the Civil War, becoming a terrorizing form of extra-judicial executions carried out largely against black people. Lynchings declined the first part of the 20th Century, but executions became more common, in effect replacing lynching as a tool of racial violence against African Americans.2
George Hays, Governor of Arkansas wrote in 1927 that states needed the death penalty to address the “negro problem.”3
  • Black defendants often received little due process, as trials and executions sometimes both took place in a single day.

George Stinney mugshot, 1944
George Stinney mugshot, 1944, public domain.

George Stinney, at 14 years old, was the death penalty’s youngest victim during this era. After a two-hour trial and only 10 minutes of deliberation, an all-white jury sentenced him to death for the murder of two white girls. The testimony of an alibi witness and other evidence now point to Stinney’s innocence, which resulted in him receiving a posthumous exoneration in 2014 – 70 years after his execution.4
  • A full 75% of those executed in the South from 1910 to 1950 were black, even though black people were less than a quarter of the South’s population.5
  • Racial disparities for certain crimes, such as rape, were especially stark. A full 90% of the men executed for rape in the U.S. between 1930 and 1967 were black.6

Troy Davis Execution - Wednesday 7:00 pm: Protesters at the Capitol in Atlanta.
The Execution of Troy Davis, September 19-21, 2011, Wednesday 7:00 pm: Protesters at the Capitol in Atlanta, by Scott Langley, Death Penalty Photography Documentary Project.

Race and the Death Penalty in the Modern Era

  • The Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty in 1972 because of its biased and arbitrary application. States then rewrote their death penalty laws to create more consistency in death sentencing, bringing the death penalty back in 1976. Not surprisingly, the revised laws failed to eliminate racial bias as promised.
  • The race of the victim has a significant impact on who lives and who dies. Nationally, almost half (47%) of all murder victims since the 1970s are black. But for cases ending in an execution, only 17% of murder victims are black.7
  • Studies in states as diverse as California, Ohio, and Georgia have found that people convicted of murdering a white victim were many times more likely to get sentenced to death than people convicted of killing African Americans or Latinos.
  • The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged racial bias in the death penalty system during the landmark case, McCleskey v. Kemp. But the Justices ruled 5-4 that such bias did not violate the Constitution.
Download the pdf
News about Race & the death penalty
News
Image of a judge's gavel.

Failed by the System

Melissa's case highlights just how misguided the death penalty can be. Texas may make a devastating and irreversible mistake. Read More
Director's Corner

Dr. King’s Vision on the Death Penalty

EJUSA Executive Director, Jamila Hodge, talks about Dr. King's vision on the death penalty. Read More
News

The Momentum Continues

The truth becomes clearer and louder: Americans, and our leaders, are increasingly done with the death penalty. Read More
  1. Stuart Banner, “Traces of Slavery: Race and the Death Penalty in Historical Perspective,” in From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America, ed. Charles Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 99.
  2. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 2nd ed. (Montgomery, AL), 6.
  3. Banner, “Traces of Slavery,” 101.
  4. Lindsey Bever, “It Took 10 Minutes to Convict 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. It Took 70 Years After to Exonerate Him,” Washington Post, December 18, 2014.
  5. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America, 21.
  6. David Oshinsky, Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010), 74.
  7. Frank Baumgartner, Amanda Grigg, and Alisa Mastro, “#BlackLivesDon’tMatter: Race-of-victim Effects in US Executions,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 3 (2015): 209-21.