Racial Bias in Sentencing

In the previous excerpt of the documentary film, “Race to Execution,” it was said, “The face of crime for most people is a dark face,” so basically, if there is an African American suspect in a crime, most people has condemned him or her for the crime even before the trial. This dangerous way of thinking has put restrains to the investigation and prosecution process: the investigators do not do their job objectively and the prosecutors use their powers to assemble a subjective jury. For example, in 1984, less than four months after a white Alabaman man, Hugh Kite, was killed, a black man, Robert Tarver, was sentenced to die in a trial in which eleven white Alabamans and one African American composed the defendant’s “jury of his peers” (“Race to Execution.”) In fact, a January 2003 study released by the University of Maryland concluded that prosecutors are more likely to seek a death sentence when the race of the victim is white and are less likely to seek a death sentence when the victim is African-American (“Death Penalty and Race.”) At this point, death penalty supporters, such as Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), would object that if one murderer is granted life in prison while another is executed, it is only because of the extraordinary degree of leniency that we have in our American system of jurisprudence, and not because of any intrinsic unfairness (Kenneth Jost). Although I grant that case by case, there will be unique additional factors that will affect the outcome of the sentence, the statement of Rep. Lamar Smith is far from the truth which has been demonstrated in the following graph. Furthermore, a 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale University School of Law revealed that African-American defendants receive the death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white (“Death Penalty and Race.”)




Work Cited

“Death Penalty and Race.” www.amnestyusa.org. Amnesty International USA. Web. 4 Sep. 2009.

Jost, K. “Rethinking the death penalty.” CQ Researcher 11 (2001): 945-968. CQ Researcher Online. Web. 1 Sep. 2009.

Race to Execution. Dir. Rachel Lyon. Filmakers Library, 2007.[i]ndependentLens. PBS. Web. 3 Sep. 2009.