Racial Discrimination in Death Penalty Decisions
Discuss the U.S. Department of Justice’s procedures governing death penalty decisions. Did they do anything to shore up concerns of racial discrimination?
Your submission should be a 3-4 page APA formatted paper. Be sure to use a minimum of 2 outside resources.
Racial Discrimination in Death Penalty Decisions
The death penalty involves executing a convict who commits a capital crime such as manslaughter and homicides, drug trafficking, kidnapping, sexual assault and mass murders, among other atrocious violations of human rights. The united states still practice capital punishment in some of its states. The death penalty had initially been abolished, but following amendments of the laws were reinstated in 1976 (Baumgartner, 2017). Capital punishment has come under intense scrutiny over the years, being one of the most racially biased procedures in the American Criminal Justice system. Racial disparities in the criminal justice system have spurred debate among policymakers and critics. According to statistics from the Death Penalty Information Centre, 80% of execution in 2016 were black defendants than any total number of other ethnic groups combined. This discourse seeks to elaborate on racial discrimination and concerns towards curbing discrimination in the U.S Department of justice (Baumgartner, 2017).
Racial discrimination continues to creep the department of justice today, with the increased prominence of implicit biases, categorically from law enforcement, jurors or even witnesses contributing to the harsher penalties on minorities. While these prejudices are hard to curb, capital punishment’s unfair use can only be faced off by eliminating the whole thing, which proves to be difficult and gradual but promising. Contemporary, racial discrimination has taken a slightly different shift, whereby the victim’s race outweighs that of the defendant in the determination of the death penalty (Spohn, 2017). For instance, a person involved in the murder of a white person is more likely to be sentenced to death than the one involved in killing a black person, which even increases if the defendant is black, accused of killing their white counterparts. Additionally, another contributing fact to this racial bias is the exclusion jurors based on their race in the notion that they are incapable of serving as fair jurors.
Due to these concerns on increased racial discrimination in the criminal justice system about the death penalty procedures, There have been several protests on racial prejudice in the criminal justice system has several affiliated movements have been created to raise awareness of this perennial struggle for equity and fairness in the administration of justice in the U.S. since the pre-colonial periods, people of color were subjected to more gruesome modes of exceptions compared to their white counterparts (Spohn, 2017). Meanwhile, a few measures have been implemented to control factors that contribute to racial discrimination governing death penalty decisions in the criminal justice systems. Firstly, the U.S Supreme Court has been actively involved in overturning death sentences where discrimination is involved. An example was in 2018; the supreme court overturned the death sentence of Keith Tharpe, a black man, following the jurors’ bias remarks questioning black people’s humanity. Moreover, the supreme court has reviewed cases by not permitting the use of testimony linking racial discrimination to execute people of color (Bandes, 2017).
Secondly, another significant means of ending the death penalty is through total abolitions. More states in America are abolishing the death penalty Colorado being among the recent state to end capital punishment in replacement with life sentences with no possibility of parole.as more liberty unions come forward to condemn the use of the death penalty as it inherently violates the human rights, the right to life. Additionally, the Racial Justice Act plays an imperative role as it uncovers the ugly realities of racism with the department of justice. It helps defendants in the death row argue in cases where race played a role in the death sentence (Roth, 2019). Since its enactment, many death sentence convictions are being reverted to life sentences as more convicts receive resentencing following the prove of racial disparity in their sentences. These measures have played an important role in shaping the procedures of the death penalty today. However, the issues are not fully resolved with more effort could lead to the total abolishment of the death sentence in all the states of the united states.
Conclusion
Incidents of racial discrimination in the department of justice in procedures governing the death penalty are prominent, with black defendants than any other ethnical groups combined suffering harsher forms of penalties and execution. Capital punishment is an arbitrary and discriminatory punishment and has no place in states that values equality and fairness. In the wake to end the racial discrimination death penalty, measures have been implemented and policies enacted. However, there is more that needs to be done to end this punishment. As more states abolished death penalties in America, the future of a capital punishment free society is possible, with both the citizens and policymakers’ collective efforts.
References
Bandes, S. A. (2017). Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment. Mich. L. Rev., 116, 905.
Baumgartner, F., Davidson, M., Johnson, K., Krishnamurthy, A., & Wilson, C. (2017). Deadly Justice: A statistical portrait of the death penalty. Oxford University Press.
Spohn, C. (2017). Race and sentencing disparity. Reforming criminal justice: A report of the Academy for Justice on bridging the gap between scholarship and reform, 4, 169-186.
Roth, M. (2019). Discriminatory Death: An Analysis of the Legislative Advocacy Against the North Carolina Racial Justice Act. Kennedy School Review, 20, 57-71.
