¶ … Capital Punishment System is Still Racially Biased" by David A. Love asserts that the times when the death penalty tends to be administered is based on generally arbitrary, unfair and racially biased factors, and is seldom based on the merits of the case. One example that Love offers is the Racial Justice Act which is legislation in North Carolina that allows a death row prisoner to challenge their sentencing through the use of statistical evidence of racial prejudice in the nation. The very fact that such legislation exists in America is a shining piece of evidence for the fact that our nation is indeed a very skewed one when it comes to racial inequality, and that there is a long history of the legal and illegal persecution of others according to race. Love demonstrates compelling evidence to demonstrate how capital punishment has long been an issue of race, with the bulk of death row prisoners being black or Latino men. Geographically, the bulk of all capital punishments sites of administration...
Basically, this reading takes a firm stance on the issue of capital punishment and race in America, an issue that we've discussed at length via our readings, and states unequivocally that the means by which capital punishment is administered is just another manifestation of deep-ceded prejudice. It echoes one of the events of the case McClesky vs. Kemp of 1987: McKlesky was a black man charged with killing a white police officer during an armed robbery, as part of his defense, he offered up a study which starkly demonstrated the racism present within the justice system: the study looked at over 2,000 murder cases that were tried in George during the 1970s. The researchers found that if a black man was accused of killing a white man, he would be sentenced to death 11% of the time; if it was the opposite, they would be sentenced to death 1% of the time: this is an undeniable piece of evidence for the sheer prejudice inherent within the justice system.
A good example is the 1985 murder of convenience store clerk Cynthia Barlieb, whose murder was prosecuted by a district attorney bent on securing execution for Barlieb's killer (Pompeilo 2005). The original trial and all the subsequent appeals forced Barlieb's family, including four young daughters, to spend 17 years in the legal process - her oldest daughter was 8 years old when Cynthia was first shot, and 25 when
" This article puts forward the notion that when analyzing the "...relationships between minority groups and mainstream populations," the issue of whether the use of "formal control is applied fairly and consistently between these different groups" is a pivotal place to begin (Ruddell, et al., 2004). It is pivotal because "injustice" not only can have "a corrosive effect" on the perception of the fairness (or unfairness) of the criminal justice system;
However, the reasons why people commit crime are as different as the individuals themselves. Intentional murder comes in two different flavors. The first is the carefully plotted, well thought out, planned act. In this scenario, motivational theory takes over. The person must feel that they will gain some type of value from the action. It may be that they gain something, such as money, or they may feel that
public to scholars, the death penalty has come under severe criticism in contemporary epoch. The debate between the supporters and criticizers of capital punishment has been going on for decades. Is death penalty constitutional? What are the factors that may render it unconstitutional? Is racial discrimination one of such factors? The paper uses a set of law review articles and highlights racial discrimination in death penalty in United States, discusses
Capital punishment is defined as the legal infliction of death as a punishment, or the death penalty. The United States is one of a decreasing number of countries who still practice capital punishment, using methods such as lethal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the first known execution in the United States was carried out in 1608. During the Revolutionary War,
Murder cannot be a decried and yet practiced by the same entity without being hypocritical. Innumerable individuals on death row have been wrongfully convicted due to any number of reasons. The appeals of death row inmates sometimes never get heard. Those inmates who cannot afford to fight a good appeal are the worse off of all. Because DNA testing and more traditional forms of evidence can be used to
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now