The cure for over-applying the death penalty to blacks is not to execute fewer blacks, but more whites.
The whole concept of a moratorium on the death penalty because of alleged bias is wrong. The guilty ones deserve to die. If you can show that any of them are really innocent, by all means let them go, but kill the rest. And if there are other, white murderers who also deserve to die, kill them too.
Notwithstanding that a bias against blacks who kill whites is also a bias in favor of blacks who kill blacks.
It has been said before, but needs repeating. The apparent bias against blacks who kill whites is really a bias against strangers who kill strangers. These murders are going to be statistically over-represented in cross-racial murders, because of the lower likelihood of blacks and whites knowing each other well enough to kill each other.
The kind of murder for which anyone is at all likely to get the DP is robbing a liquor store and shooting the clerk, or things like that. Killing a random stranger might get you the death penalty - killing an acquaintance almost never does. Which is why OJ would not have been executed even if he were convicted of the two murders he was obviously and clearly guilty of, and for which he richly deserved the DP (IMO). Nor will Robert Blake be executed. Nor would he even if his ex-wife were black.
This makes no sense. The system isn’t killing enough people, so we will kill less people. WTF?
And I have heard the opposite argument - When a moratorium is pronounced, the abolition movement will lose steam because there is no death penalty, and when the moratorium expires you have to start all over again.
Of course, you should realize that I am presenting the arguments that have been given to me, but I don’t necessarily agree with them, so I’m probably not giving those arguments full justice.
This is very probably true.
Also note the argument by Shodan - when you present a case stating that the death penalty is unfairly applied, many people will retort “well then we need to make it fair.”
I fall into the “good step, wrong reasons” camp. I’m very cynical of Glendening’s motives and don’t see it as similar to George Ryan’s moratorium in Illinois, which was done to prevent innocent people from being executed.
RTF, I had though that the Post had said that 12 of the 16 people on death row were black.
I have mixed feelings about dp. This ‘study’ could have been done w/out a moratorium, but doing that DOES seem hypocritical.
The implications of this whole thing bothers me.
Do we know anything about the cases against these death row inmates?
About the majority in prison being nonwhites killing whites–(per WASH POST cite) doesn’t the DEGREE of violence contribute to the decision for the dp? Do we have reason to believe that these inmates are less deserving of their sentence due to reasons other than stats, race, and some perceived bias?
Do we know how many whites were put on trial compared to the # of minorities? Sorry to state the obvious, but if the majority of murders were allegedly committed by blacks than of course the # will be skewed.
So what do you do if for whatever reason there is evidence supporting a bias? Give them all life w/out parole? You would have to support that they were held up to a different standard than whites in comparble cases.
And what does this mean for the future determinations? How does a judge make that deciosn w/out fear of being labled racist if that person is given dp and, well, deserves it?
I know NOBODY deserves it in some opinions, but for ‘arguements sake’, this isn’t about whether or not to utilize the dp, it is about about HOW it is used.
This was the experience in Canada. The last execution was in 1963. From that time on the federal government had a policy of commuting death sentences to life imprisonment. Abolition of the death penalty occurred about ten years later, in the mid-seventies, because it was pretty clear that during those ten years without the death penalty, murder rates didn’t change.
I’m trying to find the chart that ran in the Post the day after the moratorium was declared, because it shows a lot more than just the race of the accused and the victim. It shows where those crimes were committed. Out of the 13 men on death row in Maryland, only two were from outside of Baltimore County. Does that mean that minorities in Baltimore County are more violent than minorities elsewhere in Maryland? Certainly not. What it means is this: if you are a minority convicted of killing a white person in Baltimore County, you are more likely to get the death penalty than anyone else convicted of murder in the state of Maryland. To me, that demonstrates a clear bias in the application of the death penalty in MD, and I strongly suspect other states’ death rows have a similar bias. This is, of course, to say nothing of the fact that none of these inmates were wealthy enough to afford their own lawyers and had to make do with the lawyers the Court provided them and the amount of money the Court deemed sufficient for the defense to investigate the case. I’m not sure if it’s a set amount or not, but as I understand it it’s usually nowhere near really sufficient.
Exonerating evidence, perhaps? There have been 13 prisoners freed from Death Row (some of those from prison entirely) in Illinois due to subsequent investigations by independent groups that have conclusively proven innocence. Nationally, I believe the number of DR sentences repealed or commuted have now totaled 100. Is Maryland’s death row somehow immune from this phenomenon?
So you’re saying Blacks are more likely to commit murder than whites? Blacks are therefore more violent?
I think that’s been adequately demonstrated, myself.
For me, it is about whether or not to utilize it. I do not support the death penalty under any circumstances and it is impossible for me to even theoretically find a basis for supporting its use.
Activism, pure and simple. The Campaign to End the Death Penalty has been working for years around this issue, organizing its efforts when an execution was imminent and continuing the fight through such events as “Live from Death Row” where they had prisoners in Baltimore’s SuperMax call in to a speakerphone and talk to audiences. The first time the CEDP really organized around an execution in MD was in 1998, with the execution of Tyrone Gilliam. We got a lot of attention but we weren’t large enough or experienced enough to affect anything, and Tyrone was executed. The second time around was in 2000, with the case of Eugene Colvin-El. The CEDP had worked hard over the intervening two years to build support and an activist base, and those efforts paid off with the commutation of Eugene’s sentence. Finally, this year the execution of Wesley Baker was on the agenda, and those four years of activism and political pressure paid off. We’d been working quite hard, not only among the community at the grassroots level, but bringing the case to the MD legislature and raising the issue’s profile in general. And the result was obviously quite tremendous.