[MandoMan]

Originally Posted by blueash

This entire thread is so typical of discussions of race on this and other websites. A story is posted by someone who from reading their past posts would be much more likely be anti - BLM and he hopes to stir up a discussion about race. He doesn't bother to actually read the material and doesn't seem to understand the point of the study or else he is deliberately mistaking the authors' viewpoint.

One anti-BLM poster comes here to make tell us:
[the authors did give the race of killer and victim so your implication is false]

something he thinks is very important about race and murder and that the authors are deliberately withholding data as to present the data would hurt their position.

and that


again to tell us that blacks are criminals and that therefore the justice system has to deal with them in an out of proportional amount.

When it is pointed out that the conclusion of the study is that race, not frequency of crimes, is what is studied and a black death vs a white death is not treated the same by the state of Georgia in the time period examined we are treated to a new set of confused people posting:



I don't mind be corrected by people who are on topic, but the topic here is not what is the ratio of such crimes. It is how are such crimes punished and you will find a key factor is race. If I used your data and it showed that of the 234 white killers none got the death sentence for killing a black person, but every black person, all 514 who killed a white person was given a death sentence would you tell me that justice is equally applied to black and white? Nope. Of course that is not the rate of sentencing but your data is meaningless to the question addressed in the study which looks at the percentage of death sentences carried out on people who are sentenced to die for killing a white person vs killing a black person.

This paper shows that race plays a role in the administration of the death penalty. It has already been shown to play a role in arrests and convictions. You can all say quit talking about race as it isn't important. Funny how white people say that.

Just today we have two more stories about cops acting all racist against black families in a way that would just not happen if the victims of the police action had been white.

https://indyweek.com/news/northcarolina/johnston-county-state-troopers-violent-encounter/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us]A White State Trooper’s Violent Encounter with Two Black Teens Results in No Charges and Many Questions - INDY Week[/url]

Aurora Police 'Mistake' Black Family's SUV for Motorcycle | Law & Crime

Every single day there are stories that show how Black Lives don't Matter to too many cops. How they have the same built in automatic prejudice that a Black face equals a criminal not an innocent citizen which those of us who are white never have to fear or face.

If Black leaders would just make their people not commit so many crimes then all Black people wouldn't be seen as criminals. Do you all recall how cocaine was the scourge of America and lock those people away forever.. until it turned out white people used it too, then it became we need drug addiction treatment not jail.. ditto for heroin now. Race is a critical factor in what is seen as a crime, in how police do their jobs, in how charging decisions are made, in how juries see evidence and judge guilt, in how sentences are handed down, and now also in how executions are carried out. We do not have equal justice, racially blind justice. The authors are showing that to you if you care to read all 69 pages.

The law is required to be applied in a race neutral way to be constitutional, including the imposition of execution. Nor can it be arbitrary such as simply deciding to execute people whose birthday is evenly divisible by 7. As the authors state on page 52

"As applied to executions, the original research presented in this paper would suffice to make a prima facie case of disparate treatment among those sentenced to death,
and so the burden would shift to the state to prove that the system was executing persons in a race-neutral manner."

This paper is just another bit of evidence that our justice system is not just and a plea for making capital punishment a thing of the past.

Sorry, not sorry

Thanks for your post. Actually, I had spent over an hour reading about thirty pages of the scholarly paper before posting. I doubt that very many read to the end. My interest was simply in the odd fact that apparently equality before the law would require executing killers 17 times as often. It was as if the anti-death penalty NYTimes had failed to notice the contradiction. Even then, that would only be (what was it?) 2.3% of murderers executed? I doubt that executing around three dozen murderers would stop the problem of people killing other people. It may be an equality not to be sought, an inequity not to be righted. If people watching the news saw that headline and thought “this is a terrible inequity,” they would be seriously misunderstanding the numbers.