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Death Penalty In America Essay

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The aim of this research paper is to argue against the use of the death penalty in America. The paper will cover several issues that concern the death penalty and these issues include the constitutionality of capital punishment, wrongly accused on death row, and feasibility. Landmark court cases and precedents will be discussed to illustrate how capital punishment has changed throughout the years and what the limits of the punishment are. Cases such as Furman v. Georgia had established that the arbitrary and inconsistent enforcement of the death penalty had violated the eight and fourteenth amendments, therefore the court had issued a moratorium on the death penalty which lasted for several years. Justices of the Furman case also held that …show more content…

Georgia, Justices Marshall and Douglas had stated that discrimination had occurred in criminal cases that involved the death penalty because it had been unjustly imposed on minority groups of offenders. Following the years after 1976, a trend started to appear that showed a racial bias when it came to sentencing people for capital punishment. The trend showed that a person gets the sentence for the death penalty depends on several factors such as the race of the victim and the offender. Regarding the data, a black offender who commits a crime against a white victim is more likely to get capital punishment. Furthermore, black offenders have a higher chance of getting the death penalty than white defendants because they are sentenced at a higher rate. Another reason why the cards are stacked against African Americans and other minority groups is that their cases are decided by all-white or mostly white juries which is a commonplace in many areas. After presenting statistics and facts that highlight the faults of capital cases, government officials and politicians often state after it does not matter anymore from a legal standpoint that racial discrimination has affected sentencing for executions in the past. However, they say that “the current data are too scanty to support conclusions of continuing racial discrimination” (Zeisel, 1981, p. 4). An example of this would be how Solicitor General, Robert Bork, said in his amicus curiae regarding a study’s conclusion that there was racial discrimination involved in rape cases, but he proceeded to state that there was no proof that racial discrimination

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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.

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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

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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.

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There are apparent arbitrariness and unpredictability in the outcomes of capital cases. The second flaw is unfairness. Extralegal factors such as race still play a significant role in determining which defendants are sentenced to die and which get to live. The research conducted focuses on those serious flaws and how capital jurors’ lack of instructional comprehension contributes to not only confused decision-making but also to racially discriminatory death sentencing. The authors also conducted a study that focused on the “White male dominance” effect on capital jury deliberations.

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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.

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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.

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For example, a black defendant is four times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white defendant when a similar crime is committed. Additionally, a victim’s race is a key factor in determining whether or not the defendant gets the death penalty (Time). Why does the race of a defendant or victim matter in determining whether a life is taken? Does having darker skin really make you less of a person? The racial bias and discrimination in the United States is unbelievable.

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Like in the Mississippi trial, minorities of today are often treated unfairly in trial. According to the NAACP, in their article, Criminal Justice Facts Sheet, “About 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African-Americans report using an illicit drug. 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as Africa-Americans, yet African-Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites”. This would mean that for the same drug offences, African-Americans are being put in jail at 10 time the rate of whites. The fact that African-Americans are being incarcerated at 10 times the rate of whites for the same offences, proves that there is racial injustice in the US judicial system.

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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

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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

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Furthermore, it has been documented that in some jurisdictions, Black defendants are given the death penalty

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