Blacks who kill whites are most likely to be executed
Blacks convicted of killing whites are not only more likely than other killers to receive a death sentence – they are also more likely to actually be executed, a new study [OSU press release] suggests.
This apparently is the first study to examine whether the race of murder victims affects the probability that a convicted killer gets the ultimate punishment. The study was conducted by David Jacobs, professor of sociology at Ohio State University along with Zhenchao Qian, professor of sociology at Ohio State, Jason Carmichael of McGill University and Stephanie Kent of Cleveland State University. Their results appear in the August 2007 issue of the American Sociological Review.
The study examined outcomes of 1,560 people sentenced to death in 16 states from 1973 to 2002. These 16 states were chosen because they had the complete data that the researchers needed for the study.
Other research has shown that the great majority of those sentenced to death have their sentences overturned in appeal, Jacobs said. But little is known about the factors that lead some condemned prisons to be executed.
There is more than a two-fold greater risk that an African American who killed a white person will be executed than there is for a white person who killed a non-white victim.
The study also shows that blacks who kill non-whites are less likely to be executed than other death row inmates.
“The fact that blacks who kill non-whites actually are less likely to be executed than blacks who kill whites shows there is a strong racial bias here,” Jacobs said. “Blacks are most likely to pay the ultimate price when their victims are white.”
Hispanics who killed whites were also more likely to be executed than were whites who killed non-whites, the study showed. But the risk of execution were not as strong for Hispanics who killed whites as they were for blacks who killed whites.
Here is a Newsweek interview with Jacobs and here is a 1998 study by the DPIC chronicling the racial disparity in seeking the death penalty.
I’m going to keep looking for the study itself. If someone has a link to it, please post it in the comments here.
H/T: Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty
| Print article | This entry was posted by Gideon on August 1, 2007 at 8:16 pm, and is filed under death penalty. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 4 years ago
[quote post="702"]“We have a new study on car accidents. We have no data on whether the driver was drunk, how fast he was going, or what the weather was, but our study shows….” Need we read any further? It is highly likely that this hypothetical study does not show diddly squat. If you have no data on the primary causal factors, coming up with anything useful on the factors you did study is unlikely.
Yet that is exactly the situation with a new study on race and executions getting much attention today. In the Newsweek story noted in today’s News Scan, interviewer Eve Conant asks lead author David Jacobs about the nonracial factors that might affect who is executed:
[Conant]: Or the nature of the crime? Or was it simply race?
[Jacobs]: We don’t have much data on the nature of the crime.
But Supreme Court regulations require a state to come up with aggravating and mitigating factors for capital cases. Aggravating factors might include, say, the killing of a child or torturing a victim. Mitigating factors might include the age of the offender or their childhood experience, whether they were abused, etc.
Yes indeed, the Supreme Court does require explicit consideration of aggravating and mitigating factors because they are important. So why aren’t the circumstances of the crime including in the study? Well, they are difficult and expensive to gather. You can’t just download them anywhere. But if you are comparing two groups that differ in race, how do you know that a difference in treatment is the result of racial discrimination and not legitimate differences in the groups if you have no data on the legitimate variables? You don’t. A good example is the Paternoster study in Maryland. Statewide data appeared to indicate a race-of-victim effect such as other studies have purported to find, but that effect slipped beneath the statistical radar when the jurisdiction of prosecution was added to the model. Local democracy and jury of the vicinage, not racism, were the reasons.[/quote]
The above from: http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/2007/08/yet_another_dubious_race_claim_1.html