A New Look at Race When Death Is Sought
By ADAM LIPTAK
About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts for more than 100 of those executions. Indeed, Harris County has sent more people to the death chamber than any state but Texas itself.
Yet Harris County’s capital justice system has not been the subject of intensive research — until now. A new study to be published in The Houston Law Review this fall has found two sorts of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and one surprising.
The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.
But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.
It has never been conclusively proven that, all else being equal, blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites in the three decades since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Many experts, including some opposed to the death penalty, have said that evidence of that sort of direct discrimination is spotty and equivocal.
But the author of the new study, Scott Phillips, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver, found a robust relationship between race and the likelihood of being sentenced to death even after the race of the victim and other factors were held constant.
His statistics have profound implications. For every 100 black defendants and 100 white defendants indicted for capital murder in Harris County, Professor Phillips found that an average of 12 white defendants and 17 black ones would be sent to death row. In other words, Professor Phillips wrote, “five black defendants would be sentenced to the ultimate sanction because of race.”
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I'm not a detractor of Rev.
I'm not a detractor of Rev. Wright, but I'll take a shot at commenting. First of all, I have little doubt that the race of the victim and the race of the defendant both play a role in prosecution and sentencing. I don't need an academic study in order to believe that.
It is important to note that the methodology of this study precludes generalizing the results from Harris county to the country as a whole. So while it is an important result, it doesn't provide any evidence as to the the impact of race in other jurisdictions.
In the applicability of this study to Harris County, I think it is important that economic status was not included in the model. They did include a variable for appointed attorney, which I suspect captures a lot of the effect of economic status, but probably not all of it. The fact that an appointed attorney was more predictive than the race of the defendant indicates to me that economic status is very important, so the ignored portion of that could affect the results substantially.
So while I agree with the general conclusions of the study, Liptak and Professor Phillips seem to be trying to make it more than it is. When the Times quotes that “five black defendants would be sentenced to the ultimate sanction because of race” that's not supported by the evidence.
It is important to note that
I think of the results of such an analysis as data for a topographical map of sorts. Harris County would be the Mount Everest of the landscape.
Harris County would be the
Let us hope.
Don't want to live there.
Whoa up, there. Just how many murders do they have in this county? From the sound of it, the murder rate in Harris County is almost as high as in Cabot Cove.
Jeremiah Wright isn't helping this
Jeremiah Wright is not helping this situation. He is, however, helping himself to massive amounts of nutjob, that make this type of gross inequity acceptable to a whole lot of people. I am a detractor of Jeremiah Wright, but only because he's done nothing on his press tour that addresses why he is serially betraying a man who refused to throw him under the bus.
That certainly takes us in a
That certainly takes us in a different direction. Let us see if I can accomodate you.