I was watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly a while back, and when one of the characters was about to be executed, I remember one of the charges being “rape of a girl of the white race” or something similar.
So, were there ever a significant number of U.S. jurisdictions which specifically had laws on the books making it a worse crime to rape a white woman than a woman of another race?
Not sure if it was written into law, but blacks and hispanics got seriously more jail time or even death sentences if the victim was white. hell, some guys got sentenced even if there wasn’t adequate proof - To Kill a Mockingbird might as well be a documentary into railroading black men on white say so unfortunately.
FWIW certain crimes can be racially aggravated in the U.K., but rape is not one of them.
Here’s one of the statistics about the unequal application of the death penalty to blacks and whites for rape:
> Other laws were simply applied selectively against blacks. Rape was once
> punishable by death in Virginia; between 1908 and 1972, only blacks were
> executed under this statute, even though 45 per cent of those convicted of
> rape were white. The one white man sentenced to death for rape during this
> period had his sentence commuted by the governor. In 1950, lawyers
> representing seven black men appealed their rape convictions on the grounds
> that only blacks were executed for the crime. The Virginia Supreme Court
> denied the appeal, stating there was “not a scintilla of evidence” of racial
> prejudice. All seven were executed.(4)
This comes from this:
http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR510521999?open&of=ENG-393