Death Penalty and Racism

Strange Fruit

        The death penalty, by any reasonable moral or ethical claim, is inherently wrong. It pins man against another man for no end rather than blood thirst. Especially in the United States, there has been a long history of racism associated with this barbaric form of punishment. Songs like Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit” serve as a time telescope to look into how often African-Americans were hanged under the shadow of Jim Crowe laws’ branches. Although we no longer hang people in the U.S., the problem of racism bleeding into the courthouse is no distant relic – the issue is well and alive today. The Amnesty International report on the Death Penalty had one extremely striking graphic where it illustrated how “the single most reliable predictor of whether someone will be sentenced to death is the race of the victim.”[1] As I am sure anyone could have easily pred

Report illustrates the disproportionate representation of African-American on Deat Row

icted, a 1990 report, the non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office (referenced in the Amnesty International Report) concluded that “a defendant was several times more likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white.” In addition, the report reveals that “the overwhelming majority of death row defendants have been executed for killing white victims, although African-Americans make about half of homicide victims.” It is made clear that racism has not just infiltrated into our system of justice; it has full on assaulted the most critical aspects of Justice. The manner in which American society still associates not even just mere criminal behavior, but such grotesque and utterly irreprehensible sin that a man is willing to condemn death to another in a tragically disproportionate way specifically towards African-Americans is gut-wrenching. At the end of the day, anyone with two-cents worth of social awareness would acknowledge that racism is a prevalent problem and is accustomed to confronting it one way or another. However, it is still mind-boggling to see how the sacred and fragile humanity of people viscously comes into question when faced with the test of the accused’s race.  Justice, at least in the Rawlsian-American ideal, is supposed to blinded just as Lady Justice is. After all, why should something so seemingly arbitrary as one’s skin complexion be a weighing factor in the blind scale’s outcome? Justice, to be fair and equal, must avoid falling prey to racist ideologies. The racist “justice” system actively attempts to degrade the worth of African-Americans in its pursuit to unjustly punish wrongdoers. Thus, it becomes evident that racism plays into the application of human rights, like life.

Amnesty International Report

---

[1] "Death Penalty and Race." Amnesty International USA. Amnesty International, 2015. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. <http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-race>.