Death Penalty Laws Upheld Even if Race Bias Is Shown : Justices’ Ruling a Blow to Capital Punishment Foes

The Supreme Court, in a crushing defeat for opponents of capital punishment, ruled today that state death penalty laws are constitutional even when statistics indicate they have been applied in racially biased ways.

By a 5-4 vote, the court upheld Georgia’s death penalty law.

The justices said statistics showing that killers of white victims draw death sentences far more frequently than killers of black victims do not establish that the Georgia system violates the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees.

The closely watched Georgia dispute, perhaps the most important capital punishment case in a decade, had been hailed as the last sweeping attack against the death penalty.

Death penalty opponents fell one vote short of casting into doubt the fates of hundreds of the nearly 1,900 men and women on Death Rows nationwide.

Pace Not Expected to Quicken

The decision is not expected to dramatically quicken the pace of executions. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, 70 U.S. prison inmates have been executed.

Writing for the court’s majority, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. said the statistical study of Georgia’s death penalty system “at most indicates a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race.”

Powell added: “Apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system. . . . Where the discretion that is fundamental to our criminal process is involved, we decline to assume that what is unexplained is invidious.”

The ruling upheld the death sentence given to Warren McCleskey for the 1978 murder of a white Atlanta policeman.

Law Professor’s Study

McCleskey’s hopes to avoid death in the state’s electric chair had been pinned on a study by a University of Iowa law professor, David Baldus.

In his study, Baldus examined every Georgia murder conviction from 1973 to 1978 and found that those who killed whites were 11 times more likely to receive the death penalty than were those who killed blacks.

Looking at those cases in which juries had the greatest discretion in deciding whether to impose death or life in prison, Baldus found that killers of whites were four times more likely to receive death sentences.

“The Baldus study does not demonstrate a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias affecting the Georgia capital-sentencing process,” Powell wrote today.

“The Constitution does not require that a state eliminate any demonstrable disparity that correlates with a potentially irrelevant factor in order to operate a criminal justice system that includes capital punishment.”

Evaluation by Legislatures

He said it is state legislatures, not the courts, that must evaluate such statistical studies and determine “the appropriate punishment for particular crimes.”

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Byron R. White, Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia joined Powell’s opinion.

Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens dissented.

“Narrowing the class of death-eligible defendants is not too high a price to pay for a death penalty system that does not discriminate on the basis of race,” Brennan wrote for the four dissenters.

95% Killed Whites

Nationwide, about 95% of Death Row inmates killed whites even though blacks are more often the victims of murder in this country.

Capital punishment opponents previously acknowledged that McCleskey’s case may represent the last broad-based assault on the death penalty. Since 1984, the high court has rejected two other broad appeals.

It ruled that death sentences may be meted out even if state courts do not try to determine whether others convicted of similar crimes were treated more leniently.