Is the death penalty inherently unfair?: An examination of the viability of race-based claims in the McCleskey era

-- By EricaSelig - 15 Apr 2010

Roughly 50% of murder victims in the United States are white. Yet, 80% of criminal defendants put to death since 1976 were convicted of killing whites. Because people tend to kill within their own races, one would expect that there are significantly more white defendants punished by the death penalty. In fact, more than half of those on death row are people of color, with Hispanics accounting for 11% and African Americans for 42%. (From the EJI). These discrepancies beg the question: Just how big of an impact does race have on the decision-making processes of prosecutors, judges, lawyers, and juries?

Looking to one of the larger death rows, that of California, the statistics become more troubling. 27.6% of murder victims in the state are white, but 82% of those executed were put to death for killing whites. And the race of the defendant also helps to predict those >1% of murder defendants that end up on death row in CA: Simply put, blacks who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who kill whites. (From Radelet).

Unfortunately, this question of disparate impact that appears to be endemic throughout the criminal justice system is something federal courts are no longer interested in addressing. McCleskey v. Kemp, decided in 1987, has essentially disallowed disparate impact statistics from exonerating defendants. Without the smoking gun of exceptionally clear evidence of purposeful discrimination, a criminal defendant will lose a race-based claim. The Court in McCleskey was concerned about the policy consequences of acknowledging discrimination: "McCleskey's claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system...Thus, if we accepted McCleskey's claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty.” McCleskey, 482 U.S. 920, 314 (1987). Also problematic was that deciding for McCleskey could potentially have resulted in all those African Americans with white victims on death row being exonerated, as the Court wasn’t willing to stop the death penalty completely.

This paper will address the problems facing criminal defendants with claims of racial discrimination in light of McCleskey, explore strategies in attempting to transcend the McCleskey framework, and ultimately argue for the abolishment of the death penalty.

In "Race and the Death Penalty Before and After McCleskey," Anthony Amsterdam posits four ways to address McCleskey: accept it, work to overrule it, co-opt it through creative litigation, or raise race-based challenges in other forums. Since acceptance is not an option and overruling unlikely, the best strategy for criminal defendants is to subvert the McCleskey decision through new and creative legal frameworks. Technically, McCleskey does not apply in the context of countywide, rather than statewide, discrimination. By providing overwhelming evidence for the inference that race does play a deciding role in the decision to impose the death penalty in the context of a single county, criminal defendants can not only win their cases but also raise public awareness and outrage about this problem. Furthermore, courts are much more likely to consider evidence solely about the defendant’s race rather than just that of the victim. Where these patterns occur, they should be litigated.

Unfortunately, not only does McCleskey provide a serious legal hurdle for death penalty advocates, so does the cost of engaging in high-stakes litigation and conducting sophisticated statistical analyses. Sometimes data on the prosecutorial decision-making process is simply not available or prohibitively expensive to collect. Charging decisions and overall prosecutorial discretion in capital-eligible cases need greater transparency and oversight, considering overwhelming evidence of the role race plays in the process (There have been over twenty studies confirming this since McCleskey).

Yet while the average public defender does not have the option of choosing a client or pursuing these analyses, if race is a potential issue, there are ways to frame this claim with more potential for success. Racial prejudice takes two forms in sentencing: it can falsely inflate aggravation and decrease valid mitigation. That is, on the whole, race can tend to make prosecutor or a jury hold a defendant more culpable and find any mitigating circumstances less compelling. David Baldus found this pattern particularly strong in the context of black defendant/white victim cases where the jury was composed of five or more male white males.

If a defendant is pursuing a race-based claim through alternative forums, such as a clemency hearing or a state court that has legislation that allows for disparate impact to be considered (Kentucky and North Carolina), a defendant has a much greater chance of success. Even in jurisdictions where McCleskey controls, if other evidence can be found of prosecutorial habits of racial discrimination, and statistics aren’t presented alone, there is also a fighting chance that racial discrimination will be found.

Ultimately, Equal Protection should be extended to those facing systemic and systematic discrimination in addition to protecting those who can prove specific instances of racial animus. According to Amsterdam, “in the long run, the Supreme Court will probably deliver the constitutional coup de grace to capital punishment after enough other agents in the criminal process and organs of government…have become so disaffected with the penalty that death sentences turn vanishingly rare.” Yet hopefully, through the work of advocates and activists in the field, this process can be made more rapidly. There are many reasons to abolish the death penalty: it’s significantly more expensive than life without parole, it has no deterrent effect, this punishment is felt collaterally by the defendant’s family and community, many consider the death penalty a perverse way of “purifying” society by placing sole blame on the criminal defendant when in many cases, institution after institution has failed that defendant, and for every eight people executed by the death penalty, one has been proved innocent. Yet, for me, the most compelling reason to abolish this institution is its history and current state of systemic and systematic racial discrimination and its parallels to lynch mobs. If we really want to move on, as a society, not just from McCleskey, but from our history of oppressing minorities, we need to take a hard look at why we jail and execute disproportionately more African Americans and figure out how to fix this problem. We simply can’t solve it by ignoring the evidence.

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