Research Proposal in Law/Criminology





Introduction

When thinking of the term death penalty it is defined as "the punishment of execution, administered to someone legally convicted of a capital crime"; which seems to be the American way to punish individuals who have committed capital crimes. With the meaning of the American justice system it's the idea of being innocent until proven guilty, but it seems that that saying is one sided for only one race. But for other races mainly the black race the idea seems to be that one is guilty until proven innocent that's what makes the justice system in America seen so unfair because when it comes to an African-American the idea of possibly walking free of a criminal crime is slim to none. From those years when black people were considered the material goods through those years of Jim crow laws and Lynchings, capital punishment has been influenced heavily by race .Regrettably its not past's remnant as two of the leading researchers on issues of capital punishment and race, professor Baldus and statistician Woodworth with other colleagues in Philadelphia, conducted a sensitive study of race and death penalty which disclosed this issue further with its results showing that the chances of a death sentence to a black defendant is 4 times higher than whites. The data was based on several forms of analysis but the conclusion remained same.

Studies on the issue of capital punishment been biased on the basis of race, have proven to be significant. A recent example of that is the executions which took place at Arkansas, where 195 of the convicted were executed and out of them 134 were black males. This result and the other studies reveal that whites are almost never executed for killing blacks but blacks are immediately sentenced to death ...