Throughout
history, minorities have been ill-represented in the criminal justice system,
particularly in cases where the possible outcome is death. In early America, blacks were lynched for the
slightest violation of informal laws and many of these killings occured without
any type of due process. As the judicial
system has matured, minorities have found better representation but it is not
completely unbiased. In the past twenty
years strict controls have been implemented but the system still has symptoms
of racial bias. This racial bias was
first recognized by the Supreme Court in
Fruman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238
(1972). The Supreme Court Justices
decide that the death penalty was being handed out unfairly and according to
Gest (1996) the Supreme Court felt the death penalty was being imposed
"freakishly' and 'wantonly" and "most often on
blacks." Several years later in
Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), the Supreme Court decided, with
efficient controls, the death penalty could be used constitutionally. Yet, even with these various controls, the
system does not effectively eliminate racial bias.
According to
Professor Steven Goldstein of Florida State University, "There are so many
discretionary stages: whether the
prosecutor decides to seek the death penalty, whether the jury recommends it,
whether the judge gives it" (As cited in Smolowe, 1991, 68). It is in these discretionary stages that
racial biases can infect the system of dealing out death sentences. Smolowe (1991) shows this infection by giving
examples of two cases decided in February of
1991, both in Columbus. The first
example is a white defendant named James
Robert Caldwell who was convicted of stabbing his 10 year old son repeatedly
and raping and killing his 12 year old daughter. The second example is of a black man, Jerry
Walker, convicted of killing a 22-year-old white man while robbing a
convenience-store. Caldwell's trial
lasted three times as long as Walker's and Caldwell received a life sentence
while Walker received a death sentence.
In these examples, it is believed that not only the race of the victims,
but also the value of the victims, biased the sentencing decisions. The 22-year-old man killed by Walker was the
son of a Army commander at Fort Benning while Caldwell's victims were not
influential in the community. In
examples such as these, it becomes evident that racial bias, in any or all of
the discretionary stages, becomes racial injustice in the end. Smolowe (1991) also makes the point that
Columbus is not alone: "A 1990
report prepared by the government's General Accounting Office found 'a pattern
of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing and
imposition of the death penalty."
In an article by
Seligman (1994), Professor Joseph Katz
of Georgia State "and other scholars have made a separate point about bias
claims based on the 'devalued lives' of murder victims." Seligman also asserts that those claiming
bias believe that it is in the race of the victim and not the race of the
defendant, and because the lives of blacks have been "devalued,' people
who murder blacks are less likely to receive death sentences than those who
murder whites" (Seligman, 1994, 113).
An Iowa Law Professor, David Baldus, also found that "juries put a
premium on the lives of victims" (As cited in Lacayo, 1987, 80). In a study of more than 2,000 Georgia murder
cases, Baldus found that "those who killed whites were 4.3 times as likely
to receive the death penalty as those who killed blacks. And blacks who killed whites were most likely
of all to be condemned to die" (As cited in Lacayo, 1987, 80). According to Gest (1996), of those executed
since the reinstatement of the death penalty, 80% have murdered whites, while
only 12% of those executed in the same time period have had black victims. These figures show an obvious trend of racial
bias against those who murdered whites.
Could these disparities be because, as sociologist Michael Radelet put
it, "Prosecutors are political animals, they are influenced by community
outrage, which is subtly influenced by race," or is it because "it is
built into the system that those in the predominant race will be more concerned
about crime victims of their own race," as stated by Welsh White of the
University of Pittsburgh Law School (As cited in Gest, 1986, 25).
Because of the
immense possibility of discrimination in sentencing in capital punishment
cases, each stage of prosecution must be controlled as much as possible. Although these offenders are the worst
the criminal justice system has to offer, prosecutors must be encouraged to
consider the crime and not the race of the victim or offender and the judge
must attempt to exclude the same racial issue when deciding the
punishment. I believe Justice Brennan
said it best when he wrote the dissenting opinion in a capital punishment
appeal. He wrote, "It is tempting
to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our
own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which
they die. Such an illusion is ultimately
corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined"
(As cited in Lacayo, 1987, 80). With
great effort, the judicial controls can begin to battle the racial bias of
Americas Judicial system but to completely eliminate such a bias, the people
involved in the judicial process must learn to look past the race of the
offender or the value of the victim, and instead focus on circumstances of the
crime.
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