[kendi]

Originally Posted by Choro&Swing

Today you are likely to hear on network news “shocking” information that people who kill “whites” are 17 times as likely to be executed as are people who kill “black” people. This is presented as a horrible instance of racism in action. But what is going on here? I’m quite puzzled.

Here is the New York Times article on the topic proclaiming a “Vast Racial Gap”:

A Vast Racial Gap in Death Penalty Cases, New Study Finds - The New York Times

Here is the 69 page scholarly Harvard University study, “Whom the State Kills,” on which the article is based:

https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/u...or-Website.pdf

Here is the chart from that paper on which the Times article is based (bottom of the page, perhaps):

What does the chart actually show: Only 2.26% of people who kill “white” victims are actually executed. By contrast, only 0.13% of people who kill “black” victims are actually executed. That’s where the “17 times as many” comes from. Out of 1503 killers of “black” victims, only 20 received the death sentence, and only 2 of the killers were actually executed. (One a murder of military personnel and the other a murder by a person in the military.) Out of 980 killers of “white” victims, by contrast, 107 were given the death penalty, though only 22 were executed.

Note that the Harvard study does NOT say what the race of the killers was. FBI statistics show that in the vast majority of cases, “whites” are killed by “whites and “blacks” are killed by “blacks”, but this article doesn’t say.

So, I’m puzzled about what we are to draw from this article. I’m sure what will be on television news will be something like “Glaring Inequality!” But how do we fix this inequality? In these days when we are constantly told that BLM, what are they proposing? In the name of equality, are we to cut back on the number of killers of “white” victims who are executed? Or are we to increase the number of killers of “black” victims who are executed by 17 times?

What do you think?

I’m not really interested in taking the time to read the links you posted. But anytime media quotes a so called “study” or “research” people tend to automatically take it as fact. No matter that the studies more often than not are skewed Or just plain lies due to a variety of reasons. Some of which are bias; agenda; sample studied not large enough; sample studied too narrowly focused so can’t be generalized to the population as whole; do not take into account factors that can’t be controlled in the study but will render it unreliable; too many variables in the samples; etc., etc.