As a criminology student, I have talked about the death penalty in almost every single class I’ve taken, from Psychology and Law to Criminal Adjudication to Criminal Procedure. At this point, I have written so many papers and been a part of so many discussions that I thought I had heard every argument both for and against the death penalty. The arguments mostly discuss implications such as cost, closure for the family, deterrence- but before this semester I had never thought about the cultural implications of having the death penalty.
This semester, my Criminal Law class is a blended class, meaning we meet once a week and have an “online” type class the other day of the week that includes discussion posts and assignments. A few weeks ago, we were assigned to watch a Ted Talk titled “We need to talk about injustice,'' a talk by a human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson. Bryan’s talk focuses on the concept of identity and how that relates to the criminal and justice system, specifically how we treat those who have broken the law. Towards the middle of his talk, Bryan shares an experience that he had when he was giving a lecture on the death penalty in Germany. A woman stood up and said:
“We don’t have the death penalty in Germany, and of course we can never have the death penalty in Germany. There’s no way with our history that we can ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people.”
After hearing this comment, Bryan poses the question “what would it feel like in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish?.” I was appalled by this thought, as was Bryan, and when he went on further to talk about how this is true of our country, I was even more horrified.
It’s no secret that America’s history is littered with racism, terrorism and discrimination. People of color in this country have gone through too many horrifying events to count- slavery, the Trail of Tears, the actions of the KKK, and far too many more. Although many think that life is all sunshine and roses nowadays now that there is no longer segregation, everyone has an “equal” right to vote, etc, there are still many, many instances of injustice for people of color, and a lot of those injustices are manifested within the criminal justice system.
To name a few,
University of Iowa Law professor Dabid Baldus found that during the 1980s prosecutors in Georgia sought the death penalty for 70 % of black defendants with white victims, but for only 15% of white defendants with black victims.
In 2017, the United States Department of Justice reviewed federal death row cases and found that 48 percent of White defendants were able to receive a sentence less than death through plea bargaining, but only 25 percent of Black defendants and 28 percent of Hispanic defendants were able to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences.
Since the first DNA exoneration in 1989, 367 have been exonerated from their alleged crimes. Of those 367 people, 61% were African American- twice as many as Caucasian (30%). 21 of those 367 were on death row.
In a country where African American people are more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder, who are we to still have the death penalty? After all people of color have been through at the hands of this country, who are we to still have systematic killing of people when those people are disproportionately POC? As Bryan Stevenson puts it, we have the death penalty “in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched.”
Yes, there can be arguments made for and against the death penalty based on cost, on deterrence, on closure- but what kind of message are we putting out, with our history, by allowing the death penalty to exist?
We need to do better.