Forty years have gone by and I think it’s finally time we acknowledge the inconvenient truth; Capital punishment is not a fair means of punishment and disproportionately affects minorities.
In the landmark Supreme Court case McCleskey v. Kemp, a study conducted by David Baldus, a late Iowa Law Professor, concluded that black defendants indicted for murder were convicted nearly twice as much as white defendants and black defendants who killed white people received the death penalty four times more often than black defendants who killed other black people. This argument was a highlight of the case, but did not stop the Supreme Court from ignoring the statistics regarding racial bias in capital punishment cases. A vote of 5-4 ruled that tendencies
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So far in 2016 white criminals account for 71% of police officer killings. How is it possible that a crime that often demands the death penalty has an overwhelming percentage of White perpetrators, yet these same people are executed much less frequently? The answer is that if the system was not racist, these results would be impossible.
Many supporters of the death penalty often cite the “eye for an eye argument,” meaning that if someone kills another individual, the murderer should suffer execution. This argument, although not the most peaceful, is undoubtedly the most fair way of going about things, assuming of course there are no outside factors that would make the results biased.
Gandhi once stated that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Clearly, our current judicial system cannot handle capital punishment, as it is too racially biased. It’s for the best that we end this senseless targeting of minorities before it’s too late and must endure Gandhi’s prediction. On the bright side, if we do all go blind, at least capital punishment trials may experience less racially-charged