"Put To Death For Being Black: New Hope Against Judicial System Bias," is Touré's latest Time column. Here's the beginning:
The wind of revolution is beginning to blow through the halls of justice. It’s a small breeze now and the impact of what many consider one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century still weighs heavily, but in North Carolina something called the Racial Justice Act is suggesting that a change is gonna come.
Many studies have shown that there is significant racial bias in the administration of the death penalty. Defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death for killing whites than for killing blacks and black defendants are more likely to get the death penalty than whites, as was referenced in David Baldus’s 1998 report “Racial Discrimination and the Death Penalty”. But a study by Jennifer Eberhardt found the impact of race to be even more nuanced: judges and juries perceive defendants who have physical traits that are stereotypically associated with blackness (broad nose, big lips, dark skin) to be more “death worthy.” What a horrific term. In Eberhardt’s study, stereotypically black-looking defendants were twice as likely to be sentenced to death. Sociologists know that race matters in capital punishment, but the Supreme Court has refused to notice since a 1987 decision in McClesky v Kemp.
A Los Angeles Times survey of liberal legal scholars named McClesky one of the worst decisions since World War II. NYU law professor Anthony Anderson called it “the Dred Scott of our time,” referencing the 1857 decision that upheld slavery. Ohio State University Professor Michelle Alexander told me it was the Plessy v Ferguson of our time, referencing the 1896 decision to justify racial segregation. Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the majority opinion on McClesky, later told his biographer that was one of two votes he regretted.
Earlier coverage of the RJA ruling, McCleskey, and David Baldus at the links. Related posts are in the race category index.
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