Death Penalty Disparity Cited in Georgia Case

People who kill whites are 11 times more likely to get the death penalty in Georgia than those who murder blacks, civil rights groups told the Supreme Court on Friday in a case challenging Georgia’s death penalty law.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, lawyers for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights urged the justices to declare the Georgia capital punishment statute unconstitutional because it discriminates.

The high court is scheduled to hear arguments in October in the case brought by Warren McCleskey, a Georgia inmate who says the state’s death sentencing procedures are discriminatory.

McCleskey was sent to Death Row for the murder of an Atlanta police officer during a furniture store robbery.

A 1978 study by Prof. David Baldus of the University of Iowa indicates that, of all people charged with the murder of whites, black defendants receive death sentences nearly three times as often as white defendants.

Baldus studied all Georgia murder convictions from 1973 to 1978 and found that 22% of blacks who killed whites got the death penalty, compared to 1% of blacks who killed blacks, 3% of whites who killed blacks and 8% of whites who killed whites.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling reinstating capital punishment, seven people have been executed in Georgia. Six of the seven were blacks convicted of killing whites. The seventh was a white who killed a white.

Regardless of the race of the defendant, white victim cases were 11 times more likely to result in the death penalty than black victim cases, the civil rights groups said.