Prometheus 6   

Death to the death penalty

Reading Bob Herbert's editorial (pointed to below), I found out Amnesty International was releasing a report on the death penalty in the USofA today. So I go find it.

It is disgusting. And yes, you should read it. You can download a PDF of the report if you don't want to read it online.


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Death by discrimination - the continuing role of race in capital cases

In February 2002, the second part of the Columbia University study was released. It examined some of the possible reasons behind the high error rate in capital cases.(66) It found that "heavy and indiscriminate use of the death penalty creates a high risk that mistakes will occur". "Most disturbing of all", the researchers wrote, "we find that the conditions evidently pressuring counties and states to overuse the death penalty and thus increase the risk of unreliability and error include race, politics and poorly performing law enforcement systems."

On the race question, the study made the following two findings:

1. The closer the homicide risk to whites in a state comes to equalling or surpassing the risk to blacks, the higher the error rate. Other things being equal, reversal rate is twice as high where homicides are most heavily concentrated on whites compared to blacks, than where they are the most heavily concentrated on blacks.

2. The higher proportion of African-Americans in a state - and in one analysis, the more welfare recipients in a state - the higher the rate of serious capital error. Because this effect has to do with traits of the population at large, not those of particular trial participants, it appears to be an indicator of crime fears driven by racial and economic conditions.

Seeking to explain their findings as they related to race, the Columbia researchers suggested that "when whites and other influential citizens feel threatened by homicide, they put pressure on officials to punish as many criminals as severely as possible, with the result that mistakes are made, and a lot of people are initially sentenced to death who are later found to have committed a lesser crime, or no crime at all. The more African Americans there are in a state, the more likely it is that serious mistakes will be made in death penalty trials. This could be because of fears of crime driven by racial stereotypes and economic factors. It is disturbing that race plays a role in the outcome of death penalty cases, whatever the reasons."(67)

posted by Prometheus 6 at 4/24/2003 10:39:09 AM |