Colorblind Historical Analysis

The purpose behind this paper is to inform the reader about the importance and the influential outcome of the Batson V. Kentucky case. A simple overview of the case is the offender James Batson was an African American male from Kentucky. Batson was accused of burglary and receiving stolen merchandise in 1981. During the court proceedings, the judge conducted voir dire to determine the ability of the jurors and discharge the jurors that did not meet the proper qualifications. When it was the prosecutors turn to make peremptory challenges, he utilized four out of the six challenges to remove the four African Americans who were left on the jury panel.

for a dull respondent than for a white prosecutor in a practically identical case. A study in California found that the people who killed whites were general 3 times more slanted to be sentenced to death than the people who killed blacks and more than 4 times more likely than the people who killed Latinos. Looks at exhibit that 96% of states where there have been surveys of race and capital punishment, there was an example of either race-of-casualty or race-of-litigant separation, or both. A respondent was a few times more prone to be sentenced to death if the homicide casualty was white. A January 2003 study discharged by the University of Maryland presumed that race and geology are central point in capital punishment choices.

Primary Annotated Bibliography McCleskey v Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) McCleskey v Kemp is a Supreme Court case that highlighted racism in the death penalty process. The petitioner in the case provided a controversial statistical study that correlated racism in death penalty sentencings. The Supreme Court Justices were asked to answer the question of whether or not the statistical study provided could substantiate that the sentence in the case violated the petitioner’s eighth and fourteenth amendment rights. This case will be the main focus of my research paper.

Throughout history the differences found in human beings have created multitude of problems in society. Today, problems are directed towards a person’s race and ethnicity. People of different color, race, and ethnicity are often discriminated towards, and result in the segregation of culture groups. There are many examples of this found throughout case trials since the twentieth century and beyond. The Emmett Till case, for example, demonstrates the outcome of having a jury that is all from the same ethnicity, and allows common people to understand the effect this has on the justice system.

Introduction In the article “Black Judges are Tougher on Black and White Offenders”, Dr. Darrell Steffensmeier did exclusive research on prison sentencing and treatment given to both black and white offenders by black and white judges. Steffensmeier provides details that support his finding of how black judges and white judges sentence their defendants differently. Through his study at Penn State University, Steffensmeier gives information that describes the harsher treatment that black defendants may face more than white defendants when it comes to having black judges instead of white judges. In the end, Steffensmeier gives a synopsis of how black judges' emotional state can be an issue while sentencing their defendants and whether the race factor matters in the justice system and the courtroom.

Tragically, the times of racial predisposition in capital punishment are not a remainder

In McClesky v. Kemp the Supreme Court held that a study showing the death penalty in Georgia was imposed on black defendants disproportionately to white defendants failed to establish that any of the decision makers involved in the process acted with a discriminatory purpose. McClesky is a notable case in several respects. First, it highlighted the integrated nature of the criminal justice system and how each component functions to reach a certain result. Second, it emphasized the debate on which actors in the justice system have the most power and what role that power plays in reaching the result. Third, the case also underscored the importance on prosecutors keeping records of their decisions at varying stages of the criminal justice process.

Kamalu, Ngozi Caleb, Margery Coulson-Clark, and Nkechi Margaret Kamalu. " Racial Disparities in Sentencing: Implications for the Criminal Justice System and the African American Community." African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies: AJCJS 4.1 (2010): 1-31. ProQuest.

By definition racism is: “the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.” (Merriam and Webster) This problem is often times very relevant in our jury system, though if we send someone to prison, they have the right to a retrial and we can at least give them the rest of their lives back (and a lot of money in restitution). While as if we send someone to death, we can never give them their lives back. Recent studies show that in interracial murders, when there is a white defendant and a black victim, there were only 31 executions, whereas if there was a black defendant and a white victim, there was 291 executions carried out.

Source A argues that disparities between blacks and whites have been appalling in court. According to Source A, “If a black person kills a white person, they are twice as likely to receive the death sentence as white person who kills a black person” (2). This reveals that a black person has a higher rate of receiving the death sentence when tried for murdering a white person. If a white person is tried for a killing of a black person they have a 50% chance of getting the death sentence, then that means that a black person would receive a 100% chance of getting the death sentence for killing a white person.

“We Need To Talk About Injustice.”). Unfortunately, race affects the chance of execution and it happens more than it should. As a society, we have made so many improvements throughout history. The abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement has immensely improved our society but every day when we incarcerate innocent black individuals and send them to death row, we as a society are setting ourselves back sixty years. Do you want that?

The purpose of the article by Wells and Olson (2001) was to investigate research on the other-race effect and its causes as well as propose possible reforms to the justice system to deal with problems caused by the other-race effect. This article is relevant to the fields of law and psychology because cross-racial identification happens often in the justice system and can result in wrongful conviction. The other-race effect is not an absolute, other facts determined by many factors such the eyewitness’ experience with face from a different race, how distinctive the facial features are, delay between encoding of the face and recognition, among others. However there are some concerns with the design of many of the experiments used to test the

This report is helpful because it highlights how race is influenced on the death penalty. It will help me see if the death penalty is racially neutral. Coker, D. (2003). Addressing the real world of racial injustice in the criminal justice system. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Another issue that was discussed is the inequality of death penalty in practice. There have been serious issues with racial discrimination. For reference in cases with white victims and black defendants convictions occurred twenty two percent of the time while with black victims and white defendants with percentage dropped to a measly three

My theory is that race as the independent variable can affect the dependent variable of attitudes towards capital punishment in murder cases. I hypothesize that whites are more likely to be in favor of capital punishment in murder cases than black or those of any other race due to the attitude and though process of being tough on crime. While blacks and other races are more likely to oppose capital punishment in murder cases because they make up most of the prison population. For my first article “The Racial Divide in Support for the Death Penalty: Does White Racism Matter” The research question that are addressed in this article is why racist whites may be more likely to support capital punishment.