"David C. Baldus, 75, Dies; Studied Race and the Law," by Adam Liptak appears in today's edition of the New York Times.
David C. Baldus, whose pioneering research on race and the death penalty came within a vote of persuading the Supreme Court to make fundamental changes in the capital justice system, died on Monday at his home in Iowa City. He was 75.
The cause was complications of colon cancer, his wife, Joyce C. Carman, said.
Professor Baldus’s work was at the center of a 1987 Supreme Court decision, McCleskey v. Kemp, which ruled that even solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty did not offend the Constitution. The 5-to-4 ruling closed off what had seemed to opponents of the death penalty a promising line of attack.
The Supreme Court had reinstated the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia after a four-year moratorium. Georgia and other states had in the meantime enacted provisions meant to address discrimination in capital punishment.
“It seemed to us that Gregg had indulged the assumption that race had been flushed out of the system,” said John C. Boger, who argued the McCleskey case for the defendant and who is now dean of the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Professor Baldus, a longtime faculty member at the University of Iowa College of Law, and two colleagues, Charles Pulaski and George Woodworth, set out to test that assumption. Their study examined more than 2,000 murders in Georgia, controlling for some 230 variables.
The study’s findings have often been misunderstood. They did not show that blacks were significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than whites. What the study found was that people accused of killing white victims were four times as likely to be sentenced to death as those accused of killing black victims. In other words, a death sentence often hinged not on the race of the defendant but on the race of the victim.
Professor Baldus’s work was meticulous, said Anthony G. Amsterdam, a law professor at New York University and an authority on the death penalty. “Dave had a unique genius for digging into masses of messy factual information and discovering crucial human forces at work behind the purportedly impersonal administration of criminal law,” Professor Amsterdam said.
The study was presented to the Supreme Court by lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to die for killing a white police officer. “David was really the whole foundation of the case,” Dean Boger said.
But Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., writing for the majority, said individual criminal cases cannot be decided on the basis of social science research, however sound.
“In light of the safeguards designed to minimize racial bias in the process, the fundamental value of jury trial in our criminal justice system, and the benefits that discretion provides to criminal defendants,” Justice Powell wrote, “we hold that the Baldus study does not demonstrate a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias affecting the Georgia capital sentencing process.”
In 1991, after he retired, Justice Powell was asked whether there was any vote he would have liked to change.
“Yes,” he told his biographer, John C. Jeffries Jr. “McCleskey v. Kemp.”
Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired last year and who was one of the dissenters, wrote about the case in December in The New York Review of Books.
“That the murder of black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynchings,” Justice Stevens wrote.
Earlier coverage of the life of David Baldus begins at the link. More on the 1986 Supreme Court case, McCleskey v. Kemp, via Oyez.
Comments