Gideon Vs Wainwright Death Penalty

In June of 1944 a fourteen year old African American boy, weighing less than one hundred pounds by the name of George Stinney was executed. After two young white girls were murdered and dumped in a ditch, police claimed Stinney was the last person to see them alive. Stinney was then arrested and taken to a police station for questioning without his parents or an attorney present due to the fact that Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) had not been decided yet. This execution made Stinney “the youngest person in modern times to be put to death” (Bever, 2014). Seventy one years later, support for the death penalty is slowly dwindling since its reinstatement; however a large part of the United States is still in support of the death penalty. This division

African Americans face harsher circumstances in death row sentencing’s than any other race. In a study published in 2009 by Scott Phillips, a University of Denver sociology and criminology professor, conducted research between 1992 and 1999 in Harris County, Texas when an astonishing “504 defendants were indicted for capital murder” (O’Hare, 2010). At the end of his research, Phillips found that “convicted capital murderers were six times more likely to get a death sentence when they killed married whites or Hispanics with college degrees and no criminal record — as opposed to unmarried black or Asian victims with records and no college degrees” (2010). Phillip’s study proves that death row sentencing is bias as African Americans were more likely to be put on death row if their victim was of a higher social class than them. Florida’s death penalty sentencing in recent years has been extreme. “In Florida, a state where “no white person has ever been

Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis David B. Muhlhausen, PhD argues that “there is little evidence to suggest that minorities are treated unfairly. Second, capital punishment produces a strong deterrent effect that saves lives” (2007). Muhlhausen’s statement can be considered bias because he could possibly be disregarding data that was not processed by his place of employment, The Heritage Foundation Center. Muhlhausen is not the only person to claim that little evidence has been found supporting that the fact that minorities are treated unfairly. Fellow lawyer and Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, Kent Scheidegger agrees with Muehlhausen’s claim by arguing that the research the research the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has done “does not prove or even raise a reasonable suspicion that race is a significant factor in either the charging decision or the sentencing decision in California capital cases (2008).” Scheidegger’s argument is also bias because he is only using the research done by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation as the basis for his argument. General Counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, Roger Clegg, JD argues that "The fact that blacks and Hispanics are charged with capital crimes out of proportion to their numbers in the general population