Los Angeles Times: Editorial: Of course the death penalty is racist. And it would be wrong even if it weren’t
Civil rights organizations and defense attorneys last month asked the California Supreme Court to invalidate the death penalty in this state for being irredeemably racist. Around the same time, Alameda County Dist. Atty. Pamela Price announced that a federal judge had ordered her to review 35 cases her office had handled over the last three decades after she discovered evidence that prosecutors systematically excluded Black and Jewish people from juries hearing capital cases.
As written, death penalty laws are race-neutral. Is the death penalty racist?
Of course it is. Evidence and experience show racial bias at play at every level of the criminal justice system, from arrest to jury selection to verdict. The disparities are particularly glaring in death sentences. Black defendants were 4.6 to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than other defendants facing similar charges, according to a landmark study of thousands of murder and manslaughter convictions dating to 1978. Latinos were 3.2 to 6.2 times more likely to be sentenced to death.
The disparity is even larger when the defendant was Black or Latino and the victim was white or Asian.