Want to Get Away with Murder? Don’t Kill a White Guy.

     Now that the federal death penalty statute’s again in play, my thoughts have turned back to a time when I first thought about capital punishment. I was very young, I heard stories of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, southern mob lynchings of African-Americans, and the sensational trial and 1962 execution of convicted Philadelphia killer, Elmo Smith, the last man sentenced to death in Pennsylvania, my home state. Over time, and this surprises me somewhat given my tendency to see many sides of issues, I’ve become an absolutist as to capital punishment. Many a student has offered up to me chances to bend a bit (Hitler’s been a popular prod, as has been the “what if were your child who had been murdered?”) and agree that the death penalty has a place in a mature, civil culture. I’ve disappointed them, sometimes sharply so, as when I’ve taught at Jewish day schools. There is simply no circumstance under which I could imagine supporting capital punishment. While I could cite many reasons, one will do here.

     A fact that tends to startle people about murder trials is that juries across the country are more likely to dish death when a murder victim is white no matter the race of the killer.

     That is, you’re far more likely to die yourself if you kill a white person, whether or not you are White, Black, Latino, or Asian, than if you kill a Black, Latino, or an Asian.

     In other words, if you murder, your own race is less likely to determine whether or not you die than is the race of your victim.

    A report from the Death Penalty Information Center, and positive in my view, shows that the overall rate by which juries and judges mete out death has declined dramatically. In 2008, 111 people were given the death penalty nationally; in 1994 the number was 328, a 2/3 drop.

   The trend appears to be continuing. It can be seen most starkly and perhaps most surprisingly in Texas where the greatest decline of juries giving the death sentence has occurred. The Lone Star State executed nine people in 2011; in the ’90s, Texas averaged thirty-four executions each year. Researchers ascribe the decline, in part, to juries’ increasing skepticism about the decency and efficacy of capital punishment. 

       And yet juries  —  and this holds for all-white as well as mixed race juries  —  appear over and again to prize white lives more than they cherish minority lives. While sad, this shouldn’t be surprising; we know that, everywhere, traditionally marginalized and victimized minorities often and unwittingly internalize majority-culture biases. Not much else could reasonably explain why juries consistently punish with the death penalty killers of white people so much more often than those who murder others. 

     Unless and until that paradigm is upended, I do not see reasonable people even considering support for capital punishment.

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Feel free to visit The Death Penalty Information Center online. https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/legacy/documents/FactSheet.pdf