CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Is Capital Punishment, as it is practiced, just for minorities?

Is Capital Punishment, as it is practiced, just for minorities?

Introduction

The death penalty, legally termed capital punishment, is the government-ordained execution of an individual who has broken a criminal law that is punishable by death. Since the earliest recordings of civilization, nearly every society has at some time justified use of capital punishment as a method to punish offenders and deter future crime.

Any discussion of crime and minorities must proceed with caution as commonly used terms such as 'crime' and 'race' can have different meanings depending on the source of the information. For instance, the types of illegal behavior typically examined in self-report surveys are not necessarily comparable to the legal categories of crime employed by the FBI in its compilation of statistics for the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Moreover, the racial category 'black' is not consistently used in the research. Sometimes this term includes black Hispanics; at other times, it is reserved for blacks who are not of Hispanic origin. At all times it should be regarded as a 'social' construct since a majority of African Americans have at least one white ancestor. With these caveats in place, let us now turn to self-reported data to see what relationship minority status has to criminal behavior. This paper discusses if capital punishment, as it is practiced, is just for minorities or not.

Discussion

The proponent of disparities in minorities' capital punishment see clear inequalities in both the federal and state capital punishment systems. Of those inmates awaiting executions in the federal system at the end of 2006, 53 percent were African Americans. According to the study, “The Federal Death Penalty System: A Statistical Survey, 1988-2000,” 50 percent of all defendants approved for death penalty prosecution were African Americans and 75 percent were minorities. According to the study, “Racial Disparities in Federal Death Penalty Prosecutions, 1988-1994,” “Racial minorities are being prosecuted under federal death penalty law far beyond their proportion in the general population or the population of criminal offenders.” A more recent study of the federal death penalty system from 1995 to 2000 found no evidence of racial bias in the stage where cases are recommended for death penalty prosecution. The study, conducted by the RAND Corporation, illustrated that the death penalty was more sought after when defendants killed white victims than when defendants killed black victims. Yet the factor that explained the disparity was the characteristics of the crime (e.g., the heinousness of the murder, such as when a person was brutally murdered and when there was more than one victim). The authors of the study assert that the findings should not be generalized to earlier or later time periods, and they admit that bias could still be present at other points in the criminal justice process at the federal level. (Blalock 2007)

Christian Perspectives On Justice

Like God's justice, human justice is a matter of the personal, not merely the mechanical. The Christian jurist, even as he carries out the ...