Death and Race

Since legal executions resumed in this country in 1977, 66 people have been put to death. In 60 of those cases, the murder victim was white. There are now 1,788 people on death row. Of them, 1,713 were convicted of killing a white person. However, blacks are six times more likely to be murder victims than whites are.

These startling facts are no accident. Statistical studies demonstrate that an individual who murders a white person is much more likely to suffer the death penalty than someone whose victim was black. In Florida, for example, no one has ever been executed for murdering a black person.

It strains credulity to see no significance in this pattern. Rather, it is obvious that society values white lives more than black lives and is more willing to impose capital punishment when a white life has been taken.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments this week in a case challenging the death penalty on just this ground. Lawyers for Warren McClesky, a black man sentenced to die for the 1978 killing of a white policeman during a robbery in Atlanta, urged the court to throw out Georgia’s death penalty law on the ground that it discriminates on the basis of race.

For 10 years, opponents of capital punishment have tried one argument after another in an effort to get the court to sweep away the death penalty, all without success. This is probably their last chance, but it should be their best chance. The facts are overwhelmingly in their favor.

McClesky’s appeal is based on a statistical study by Prof. David Baldus of the University of Iowa of 2,484 homicide cases in Georgia between 1973 and 1979. Baldus found that killers of whites were 11 times more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of blacks. After reexamining the cases to screen out aggravating circumstances, the character of the evidence and other idiosyncratic factors, he still concluded that killers of whites were more than four times as likely to be sentenced to die than killers of blacks.

For more than 30 years, the federal courts have been extremely and properly sensitive to charges of racial discrimination and have repeatedly intervened in civil cases to guarantee that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is enforced. Now the Supreme Court is being asked to do the same thing in criminal law. The justices cannot say no without closing their eyes to one of the most blatant and indefensible examples of racial discrimination ever brought before them.

In the case of Furman vs. Georgia in 1972, the Supreme Court invalidated all death penalty laws then on the books because of the arbitrary and capricious manner in which capital punishment was being meted out. If that standard still obtains--and it should--the court cannot allow the present situation to continue. The laws of this country are color blind, and death sentences cannot be imposed on the unspoken assumption that the lives of some races are more valuable than others.