Honestly, if we must have a death penalty, I don’t see why we are so wedded to lethal injection. Why not a guillotine or nitrogen asphyxiation?
When people from group X were historically much more likely to be executed without good evidence, and people from group X are still executed at a vastly higher rate even when crime disparities are taken into account, then it’s reasonable to suspect that some of the past biases that led to unjust executions might still be in play today.
The evidence is overwhelming that the death penalty is applied in a racially disparate manner.
But you’re fine with continuing to use the death penalty before the racial disparity gets fixed, right?
So if the ratio of white to black people sentenced to death in this country was exactly proportional and there existed no such historical bias, you would drop your objection to the death penalty?
Please provide this evidence, along with the evidence that proves that this disparity is the result of malicious intent on the part of prosecutors against black people.
Yes. If a person deserves to die for their crimes, it is irrelevant that some other person in some other state was treated unfairly 70 years ago.
[Here’s](http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-penalty-black-and-white-who-lives-who-dies-who-decides#Black Defendants and the Race of the Victims) a fairly nuanced but presentable read. It’s about a decade out of date, but not much has changed in the numbers. Here’s another shorter article. I look forward to your posting one iota of research that contradicts these studies.
Note that your cartoonish version of racism–avowedly racist prosecutors with malicious intent–is an unserious straw man.
I’m not sure why you won’t just directly admit that you think it’s more important to kill murderers than it is to have race-neutral sentencing. That is your position, right?
If there are no avowedly racist prosecutors with malicious intent, then racial disparity in death penalty sentencing is of no consequence. You have undermined your own “strongest argument”.
Yes. Those who commit murder deserve to die.
Unconscious racism doesn’t exist or doesn’t count? There’s no such thing as people with good intent who nevertheless have racial bias? Were the majority of white Americans in 1920 racist? 1820? Were they all malicious, in your view?
That’s half the equation. What you’re saying is that it is more important to kill them than it is important to see that a white murderer of a black victim and a black murderer of a white victim are treated the same.
Again, I get it. It hurts any movement when people misrepresent the facts in its support. And I get that people doing so visibly might cause you to be biased against the entirety of the cause.
But Richard Parker suggested reading Stevenson, and I second that.
And when close to 40% of the US population oppose the death penalty, surely the majority of them do not misrepresent the facts?
All acts of racism require a conscious decision on the part of the person engaging in them.
Correct. Do you insist that racists are good people with good intent?
Both murderers deserve to die. If one of them isn’t executed for whatever reason, that is not an argument that the other shouldn’t be executed either.
No. Some of them are just misinformed, or cowardly, or operating under wrongheaded appeals to religion or morality.
Yes, most people with racial biases are good people with good intent. You only claim otherwise because it is convenient for your political principles, not because you’ve given it even 30 seconds of sustained thought.
A good person does not allow him/herself to cultivate racial bias. Racial bias is an act of intellectual laziness.
Well, then in the spirit of battling intellectual laziness, I encourage you to do some reading. You might start with Just Mercy, suggested above.
This might be a good one for you too.
Most racial bias is probably unconscious. Good people recognize the possibility that they have racial bias and strive to identify and eliminate any that remains within themselves.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in several hundred pages of reading touchy-feely testimonies about how life is unfair.
What is your argument against the thesis that murderers deserve to die?
Anthony Greenwald is the nation’s leading expert on the study of unconscious bias. It’s fine if you’re too lazy to read his book, but it would be more honest to just admit that you don’t know very much about racism instead of parading all these strongly held opinions that you refuse to examine.
I’ll take that to mean you have none, then.
None what? Arguments about what murderers “deserve?”
In my view, that’s not even the central question. One can believe murderers deserve to be killed and still think that it’s a bad idea to have such a highly discretionary and irreversible punishment be executed by our deeply flawed systems of justice.
I don’t see much point in discussing further. Your position is that there’s no such thing as bias that isn’t intentional and malicious. So this is like discussing the best method of archaeological dating with someone who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old.
How?
If murderers deserve to die, then anything that stands in the way of that is an obstacle to be resolved, not a reason to give up. To let such things stand in the way of justice is an act of moral cowardice.