Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death
Imagine this. The atmosphere of an isolated room encamped in darkness exudes nothing but a sharp shiver of despair. Two pair of worn-out, black leather boots escort a warm, human body of unethical ideas and actions to a thick sheet of paralyzing metal. The body is showcased upon the metal like a trophy of achievement, however, this trophy did not perform so well in the final run of life. A thick needle of climatic pressure approaches the body, then infiltrates the tough, bumpy skin, all the while knowingly leaving a mark that would only lead to injustice. Filled with pavulon or pancuronium bromide, the body lays there paralyzed and lifeless. Now ladies and gentleman, imagine if that was your body that just
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Regarding an article titled "Race and the Death Penalty," written by the American Civil Liberties Union, "The color of a defendant and victim's skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America. People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43% of total executions since 1976 and 55% of those currently awaiting execution." For example, in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, murders committed by African Americans are treated as more severe and "deserving" of the death penalty because of the prone, aggravating factors established by the simple initiation of "harm, fear, of pain" through the color of one's black skin ("Death Penalty in Black"). Furthermore, another measure of race's impact on the death penalty is the combined effect of the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. In the Philadelphia study, the racial combination which was most likely to result in a death sentence was a black defendant with a nonblack victim, regardless of the severity of the murder committed ("Death Penalty in Black"). When the discretion of jurors and prosecutors are heightened, the use of racial bias is implicated into a system that pushes for the upmost and unfair punishment
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.
This racial discrimination has led to a discriminatory manner that punishes blacks who victimized whites more severely compared to whites who victimize blacks. Even though race has been abolished as a legally relevant factor in capital sentencings, there are still variations in capital sentencing patterns along racial lines. The author tries to answer the question of how a system that tries to design itself as a racially neutral system can still have racial variations in capital sentencing. The author argues that there is a link between race and empathy in mitigation. The author conducted a study that focused on juror race and receptivity to mitigation and defendant race.
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.”
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.
The aforementioned case brings about an interesting and sobering question about racial discrimination and bias and its role in the courtroom. In this instance, the defendant Duane Buck was convicted of murdering his former girlfriend, and her friend in front of their young children. During the cases, sentencing hearing the defendant called upon a psychologist (Quijano) who stated, under oath that “It’s a sad commentary that minorities, Hispanics, and black people, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system”. The prosecutor followed that by asking “The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons — is that correct?” To which Quijano responded, “yes”.
America’s criminal justice system is racially biased and influenced due to the fact that the punishment a person gets is not related to the crime that 's done, funds that help African
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.
Disparities in the criminal justice system are in part a function of the interrelationship between race and class and reflect the disadvantages faced by low-income defendants. This can be seen most prominently in regard to the quality of defense
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.
People of all different races and ethnicities are locked behind bars because they have been convicted of committing a crime and they are paying for the consequences. When looking at the racial composition of a prison in the United States, it does not mimic the population. This is because some races and ethnicities are over represented in the correctional system in the U.S. (Walker, Spohn, & DeLone, 2018). According Walker et al. (2018), African-Americans/Blacks make up less than fifteen percent of the U.S. population, while this race has around thirty-seven percent of the population in the correctional system today.
Coker gives great evidence that supports racial injustice in the criminal justice system. She discusses on the Supreme Court’s rulings and accusations of racial preference in the system. This article is helpful because it supports my thesis on race playing a role on the system of criminal justice. Hurwitz, J., & Peffley, M. (1997). Public perceptions of race and crime: The role of racial stereotypes.
The New York Times Bestseller book, Just Mercy, entails true accounts of a young African- American lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, about the unjust criminal justice system of the United States. Stevenson embarks on sharing his first- hand encounters of racial prejudice and corruption against death row inmates and himself. Thus, giving vivid images of how race and social class can play a big part in the fates of people in America. After reading Just Mercy, it has given me a validation of what I’ve already known about the justice system against African-Americans especially in the South, with prior knowledge of accounts about black Americans and the deep bigotry against them. In which, my race plays an immense part of cruelly punishing black Americans without further consideration of the circumstances that led to the crime
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