Bryan Stevenson article “A Presumption of Guilt” in the New York Review of Books (July 13, 2017) draws a correlation between the lynching of black men and women and the disproportionate use of capital punishment against blacks. As lynchings of blacks became less common in the first half of the twentieth century, the use of capital punishment against blacks increased. Capital punishment abides as lynching by other means.
The civil rights legislation of the 1960s did not address racial injustice in our legal system. We are all familiar with the statistics that show how much more likely blacks are to be arrested, convicted, and punished to the fullest extent of the law. Things are destined to get worse under the present administration. If Jeff Sessions resigns as Attorney General, it will be because he wasn’t an effective enough nurse of the president’s weeping ego, and not because he was a member of the Kloset Klan.
To combat the racial inequalities in our justice system, Stevenson, a graduate of Harvard Law School, founded the Equal Justice Initiative. I know nothing about this organization except what I learned from Stevenson’s NYRB article, and from the organization’s web site. But it appears to be addressing the problem of unequal justice under the law for black people, and is most likely worthy of our support. I’m going to take a chance on it.
fredrichlariccia says
To those concerned about the state of race relations in the Trump era, it might do us all well to reflect on the wisdom of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. : ” Peace is not the absence of tension. It’s the presence of justice.”
Christopher says
I’m always a bit leery of general stats on things like this because each case is different in terms of actors, circumstances, etc. I would need to know whether a particular judge or a particular prosecutor had a record of respectively sentencing or charging black people more severely for roughly the same crime. Juries generally only meet for one trial ever so there’s not much way of telling whether that same group of 12 would be more likely to convict a black person than a white person. FWIW, I am open to the death penalty in the most heinous of cases, but the perps I can think of in cases that have achieved public notoriety which IMO might justify the death penalty are almost entirely white. Mind you, I’m not saying the stats are inaccurate, just that I’m not sure they can tell us as much as some would have us believe.
jconway says
I think the slam dunk cases are the hardest ones when it comes to opposing the death penalty. I think I’ve been quite strident in my opposition in the past, but our cause isn’t advanced when animals like Paul Shanley are unleashed back into the general population. Making it easier to keep guys like that away forever while making it harder and harder to apply the death penalty seems like the best incrementalist way to chip away at it until it is never used.
I think the scope of what we are talking about here is limited to the phenomenon of ‘hanging judges’ and DA’s running for re-election on the backs of black corpses. And it definitely still happens, especially in Texas.
jessefell says
Christopher, I agree that we need to be cautious in accepting statistics. Still, it’s well established that the use of capital punishment went up as the frequency of lynchings went down. Even more remarkable is geographical association of lynching with the use of the death penalty. Currently 31 states have statutes that allow the death penalty as a punishment for certain crimes. But of those states, the death penalty is actually applied frequently, or at all, only by those that also have a history of lynching. Texas, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, and Oklahoma are leaders in the number of applications of the death penalty; each of these states had a large number of lynchings in the past. States such as California and New Hampshire, which had few lynchings in the past, seldom apply the death penalty. And just as far more blacks were lynched that whites, so now the death penalty is applied to far more blacks than whites.
jconway says
Bryan Stevenson is the real deal and I encourage folks to go to EJI’s website and watch his fantastic TED talk. It really changed the way I think about these issues, alongside Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow. His solutions are wonkier, and in my view, more viable in addressing the problem.
Also a great podcast More Perfect addresses the issue of racial bias in jury selection during it’s inaugural episode, along with a lot of other great cases it looks at.
Lastly, economic inequality is tied in with racial discrimination. While I applaud populist economics and organizing working class voters of all races around universal programs to achieve mobility and fairness, I do think it’s important to remember that American racism is intricately linked to American capitalism. Decoupling on or the other prevents us from solving both.