[Joe V.]

Originally Posted by blueash

I am sorry you didn't read to the end of the paper as well. And if you now look at the racial information you will see that even though as you correctly state the overwhelming of black deaths are at the hand of black killers, a very large number of the executions are in cases where the victim was white but the killer was black. How come if most white deaths are caused by whites there are not more white people being executed for killing white people? Oh, systematic racism in the "justice" system might be part of the problem.

You are misunderstanding the point of the authors. The study was done to follow up on an earlier seminal paper looking at imposition of the death penalty in Georgia which showed that black defendants were much more likely to have the death penalty imposed on them especially if they killed a white person. The weakness in the study was not knowing the long term outcome.. how did being sentenced to death relate to actually being executed.

The Supreme Court attempted to address racial inequality in death sentences by saying death could only be imposed if there were aggregating circumstances. This was an attempt to eliminate racial animus in juries or judges sentencing choices. The court has not seriously looked at the outcome of that decision and this paper is addressing how race is still a huge factor in the death penalty and in execution outcome.

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