Death Penalty In America Essay

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.

Secondary Annotated Bibliography Brewer, Thomas W. "Race and Jurors' Receptivity to Mitigation in Capital Cases: The Effect of Jurors', Defendants', and Victims' Race in Combination. " Law and Human Behavior 28, no. 5 (2004): 529-45. The article begins by explaining the importance of Furman v. Gerogia (1972). Furman v. Gerogia (1972) was a Supreme Court case that decided that death sentences were being handed down in an arbitrary and standard less manner.

Name: Instructor: Course: Date: Criminal Justice Stevenson through his book has provided various examples that show that people of color and low-income individuals are more likely to be presumed fully prior to presenting their cases. The author has stated that executions are a good example of how norms and policies are used for the purposes of punishing and controlling the people of color For instance, he argues that one in three black people are expected to be sent to jail in their lifetime. Further on, eighty percent of people on death row are black while 65 percent of homicide victims are black.

The biggest disparity that was found was when a death penalty case involved a white victim and a black defendant. After reviewing the death penalty cases, there was an indication that “twenty-two percent of cases received the death penalty when a black defendant and white victim were involved….compared to only three percent when there was a black victim and white defendant involved.” The study broke this data down further and looked at the percentages of when a prosecutor seeks the death penalty. The study found that prosecutors sought the death penalty in “seventy percent of cases that involved white victims and black defendants and only nineteen percent when the roles were reversed.”

With the bar for execution being that the defendant needed to be shown to be a danger to society the testimony of the psychologist stating that a person 's race is a deciding factor in predicting future violent acts clearly brings the question of race into the supreme court. The appeal states “the latent association of African Americans with violence continues to distort perceptions of reality and result in racially biased assessments—and the risk of such bias is especially acute in death penalty proceedings. The Constitution, however, forbids racial stereotypes from affecting the administration of justice, expressly

A study by the California Judicial Council Advisory Committee on Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Courts found that the justice system gives little attention or resources to investigating crimes against minorities and that minority defendants receive harsh treatment compared to white defendants in similar circumstances. The study also found that black-on-black crime or Latino-on-Latino crime is not taken as seriously as crimes against whites. Judges seem to believe that violence is more "acceptable" to black women because they are viewed as coming from violent communities. Minorities were judged by white, middle-class values in family law matters, and were the victims of racial and cultural stereotypes, which affects the courts '

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.

In ninety-six percent of states where they have reviewed cases of race and the death penalty there had been a pattern of race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination, or even both (DPIC). The race of a defendant or a victim should not influence people in whether or not someone should die. Even if they have done terrible things, a life is still a

Jury Systems and Racial Injustice Juries are the way we make sure trials are fair, but when your jury is biased the result of the trial are often inequitable. Today we do our best to make sure trials have impartial jurors, but this was not always the case. In the 1930’s, and a lot of other decades too, the right for African Americans to have an unbiased jury was not fulfilled. This caused many African Americans to be sentenced to death when they otherwise would not have been.

Racial disparities concerning sentencing have an adverse effect on the African American community. Racial profiling and plea bargaining are contributing factors that lead to overrepresentation of minorities in the judicial system. Data and statistics support the assumption that African Americans are disproportionately subjected to racial profiling, traffic stops which leads to searches and seizures that lead to minor offenses which can also lead to incarceration, rather than probation or rehabilitation (Kamalu, Coulson-Clark, & Kamalu, 2010). The existence of racial prejudice exists when African American defendants are more likely to be convicted and given harsher charges than their white counterparts that have received the same charge, but

Should America continue to allow the death penalty? This essay will tell you why America should not be continue the death penalty. For starters, the death penalty is punishment by death; usually resulting after a crime that America calls capital crimes or capital offences. There are many of reasons why the death penalty should not be carried out in America or anywhere “Application of the death penalty tends to be arbitrary and capricious; for similar crimes, some are sentenced to death while others are not.”

The case shows that there is in fact racial discrimination in the American Criminal Justice system and that the system itself has honestly admitted that it is flawed. It illustrates that the system still needs to be scrutinized when it comes to convicting people of color and that America still does not treat everyone equally as its laws claim. This decision will produce several more appeals by individuals who feel that they may have been convicted based upon their skin color and may lead to several convictions

“The law may be color-blind as it is written, but not as it is enforced.” Racial bias in the death penalty can be traced back to Furman v. Georgia, where handing down the death penalty sentence, unfairly, constituted as a cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The reinstatement of the death penalty with its new sentencing guidelines, implemented by the Supreme Court, was to ensure that the death penalty sentence was used in a constitutional way. Despite these guidelines, somehow, racial bias has found a way to thrive. It has been documented that an individual is more likely to receive the death penalty in a case where the victim is White than in cases where the victim is Black.

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