- December
5, 2001
Death
Penalty and Race: Partners in Injustice
Robert
Dunham
The
Legal Intelligencer
For
years, study after study has established a disturbing link between race
and the death penalty.
The
concerns about racial discrimination in the administration of the death
penalty persist in virtually every jurisdiction in which death remains a
legal form of punishment, and appear intractable. And while the myth is
widely held that racial discrimination in the death penalty is exclusively
a Southern phenomenon, Philadelphia's death penalty has all the trappings
of Southern death-belt racial discrimination ... and more.
Death
penalty statistics shine an ugly spotlight on racial justice in the City
of Brotherly Love.
Philadelphia's
death row of 135 men and women is larger than that of 42 states. Ninety
percent of Philadelphia's death row are racial or ethnic minorities.
During one recent period in the mid 1990s, 40 of 41 defendants sent to
death row by Philadelphia juries (97.6 percent) were black or Latino. As
of Nov. 1, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections figures revealed that
Philadelphia's ratio of African American-to-European American death row
inmates is a shocking 8.69:1 -- nearly 11 times worse than corresponding
Department of Justice figures for death rows across the South.
A
new study by the Pennsylvania Capital Representation Project, with an
anticipated year-end release date, reveals that Philadelphia has placed
the largest number and highest concentration of black defendants on death
row of any major American city. Philadelphia is the only city in America
with more than 100 African Americans on death row, and as of July 1, had
more than three times the number of African Americans on its death row
than did any other comparably sized (1.35 million to 1.75 million) county
in the country. The others, Clark County, Nev., and Cuyahoga County, Ohio,
had 31 and 23, respectively.
The
upcoming report also discloses that, among comparably sized counties,
Philadelphia had the largest number of minorities on death row (121); the
highest percentage of African Americans on death row (83.6 percent) and
the highest percentage of minorities on death row (90.3 percent).
Philadelphia
(census population 1.5 million) had 25 more African Americans on death row
than any other county, regardless of size. Los Angeles and Harris County
(Houston), with census populations of 9.5 million and 3.4 million,
respectively, each had 87 African Americans on their death rows.
Among
all counties in the country with 30 or more death-row inmates,
Philadelphia also had the highest concentration of African Americans and
minorities on death row, and the highest per capita minority death row
population. The concentration of African Americans on Philadelphia's death
row was nearly 35 percentage points higher than for Los Angeles and more
than 25 percentage points higher than for Harris County.
The
concentration of minorities on Philadelphia's death row was more than 22
percentage points higher than for Los Angeles and nearly 25 percentage
points higher than for Harris County.
Not
surprisingly, a comprehensive study of more than 10 years of first degree
murder convictions in Philadelphia conducted by Professors David Baldus
and George Woodworth of the University of Iowa -- the nation's foremost
researchers on race and capital punishment -- published in 1998 in the
Cornell Law Review provided powerful evidence that being black
significantly increased the likelihood of receiving a death sentence in
Philadelphia.
Using
the same analytic and statistic methodology routinely employed in widely
accepted public health studies, the Philadelphia study revealed that race
is statistically more likely to affect death sentencing than smoking is to
affect the likelihood of a heart attack.
The
key findings in the study included that black defendants in Philadelphia
face odds that a jury will sentence them to death that are nearly four
times higher than for non-blacks charged with similar offenses. Black
defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death than other defendants.
Killers
of black victims are less likely to be sentenced to death than killers of
non-black victims.
The
study documented that in Philadelphia, the mere fact of being black is the
statistical equivalent of the most important statutory aggravating factors
as a basis for imposing the death penalty. In simple human terms, the
results of the study showed that, if the effects of racial discrimination
were removed from the process, 35 fewer African Americans would have been
sentenced to death in Philadelphia in the years 1983 to 1993 alone.
The
racially discriminatory imposition of the death penalty in Philadelphia
capital cases is closely related to the racial profiling that is endemic
in the selection of Philadelphia death penalty juries. Both the
prosecution and the defense bar have been guilty of racial profiling, but
the prosecution has historically been more successful in discriminating
because its primary target group is a racial minority.
Simply
put, there are fewer blacks than whites to strike, and so discrimination
against the smaller group has a disproportionate impact. And while race
discrimination in jury selection is unacceptable whether practiced by
defense lawyers or by prosecutors, it is particularly pernicious as part
of the policy and practice of state officials.
The
practice of racial profiling in the Philadelphia District Attorney's
selection of death penalty juries is now well documented.
TRAINING
TAPE
In
April 1997, in the midst of an election campaign for Philadelphia District
Attorney, the District Attorney's office released a 1987 training
videotape to the public that, in the words of the Pennsylvania Supreme
Court, "denigrated as ridiculous'" the goal of selecting a fair
and impartial jury and offered "various racial and gender stereotypes
... as reasons to discriminate in the selection of jurors."
The
tape "described in detail" techniques for discriminating in jury
selection, "including the maintenance of a running tally of the race
of the venire panel and the invention of pretextual reasons for exercising
peremptory challenges; and a willingness to deceive trial courts to
manipulate jury panels to these ends."
The
tape included such statements as: "Let's face it, ... there's the
blacks from the low-income areas[,] ... you don't want those people on
your jury."
"You
know, in selecting blacks, you don't want the real educated ones."
"In my experience, black women, young black women, are very
bad." "You're not going to have some brain surgeon from Chestnut
Hill with some nitwit from 33rd and Diamond."
Nor
can the training videotape be dismissed as the statements of a rogue
prosecutor. One local journalist reported that D.A. jury selection
training well into the 1990s showed that the practice had not changed.
Notes
from one of the lawyers present at the jury selection training program --
conducted by another prosecutor several years after the videotaped
training -- disclosed that prosecutors were again taught such things as
"The ideal jury, 12 Archie Bunkers, will convict on little
evidence."
"If
you wanted, you could strike almost all blacks. This gives you an
advantage." Both training sessions told prosecutors to keep track of
the race of jurors.
There
can be little question that city prosecutors have systemically practiced
what their trainers have preached. During the course of the landmark race
study, Professors Baldus and Woodworth had noticed a statistically
significant relationship between the racial composition of Philadelphia
death penalty juries and the disproportionate rate at which these juries
were sentencing African American defendants to death.
This
observation, coupled with the disclosure of the training tape, prompted a
second Baldus study, published earlier this year in the University of
Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, that demonstrated that the
training techniques taught in the training videotape reflected practices
long in place in the Philadelphia District Attorney's office.
This
second study tracked the District Attorney's jury selection choices over
three prosecutorial administrations between 1981 and 1997, encompassing
more than 10,000 choices to empanel or exclude prospective jurors. It
revealed a consistent, historic pattern and practice of racial profiling
by city prosecutors in the selection of capital sentencing juries. This
study documented that city prosecutors peremptorily challenged black
jurors from capital trials at double the rate that it challenged other
jurors.
The
study also showed that racial profiling by the prosecution extended to the
selection of non-black jurors: city prosecutors struck non-black jurors
from integrated neighborhoods at twice the rate of jurors from highly
segregated white neighborhoods.
City
prosecutors have publicly criticized the training videotape as advocating
discrimination while at the same time arguing in court that it does not
evidence any discriminatory policy or practice by the District Attorney's
office.
Instead
of addressing the claims on their merits, however, city prosecutors have
resisted every request to produce the notes of trial prosecutors that
followed the practice espoused in the training tape to keep track of the
race of jurors, have called the Baldus study "a fraud," and have
personally attacked defense lawyers for "willfully slander[ing]"
prosecutors by presenting historical evidence of discrimination.
The
personal attacks on Baldus and defense counsel who raise this issue are
belied by the facts -- both statistical and from the horse's mouth.
Indeed, in the case in which city prosecutors accused me of slander, a
federal judge granted the defendant a new trial, finding that the
prosecutor had discriminatorily excluded six black jurors because of their
race.
The
supposedly "slanderous" evidence was that, during the course of
23 homicide prosecutions, the trial prosecutor had struck black jurors 3.3
times more frequently than white jurors, and 10 times more frequently in
the case actually before the court.
The
prosecutor had stated on the record that she could not tell a juror's race
simply by looking at him or her, but that she had struck 12 of the 14
jurors she thought were black. (She also stated on the record that people
might mistake one Jewish juror as being black because the juror had curly
hair.) The prosecution exercised 15 peremptory challenges in the case, 12
directed at African Americans, one at a Latino prospective juror and two
at white prospective jurors.
The
prosecutor also had opposed a defense motion to strike a juror for cause
who had admitted feeling prejudiced against the defendant because he was
black and the juror had twice been the victim of crimes committed by black
perpetrators.
OTHER
FACTORS
Other
factors -- some that on the surface appear to be race neutral -- almost
certainly influence the racially disproportionate application of the death
penalty in Philadelphia. For example, Pennsylvania is one of only two
states in this country that limits a jury's capital sentencing options to
life without possibility of parole or death but does not instruct
sentencing juries what a life sentence means.
The
National Jury Project survey of capital sentencing jurors reveals that,
among all the life without parole states, Pennsylvania's jurors were the
least informed as to the meaning of a life sentence. Fully half of the
jurors surveyed believed that a defendant sentenced to life in
Pennsylvania would receive parole after 12 to 14 years.
Studies
uniformly show that jurors are more and more likely to return death
sentences as they believe that defendants will serve less and less time in
prison. But no one -- not one person -- in the history of Pennsylvania's
death penalty statute who received a sentence of life without parole after
being capitally prosecuted has ever had a reduction of that life sentence.
There
can be little question that some unquantifiable number of capital
sentencing juries have imposed death sentences out of fear caused by the
false choice of sentencing options that results from the systemic failure
to explain our sentencing option. The failure to provide a truthful life
without parole sentencing instruction is facially race neutral, but as
Willie Horton has taught us, the fear that a defendant will pose a future
danger to society is not.
When
prosecutors select for racially insulated white jurors who are the most
geographically isolated from African Americans, they select for jurors who
are the most fearful of black defendants and most likely to mete out a
death sentence out of erroneous fear of the defendant's future release.
Similarly,
Pennsylvania's aggravating circumstances that support imposition of death
are facially race neutral, but are not necessarily race neutral in
application. The facially neutral aggravating circumstance that a
defendant has a significant history of prior felony convictions involving
the use or threat of violence -- which has been judicially interpreted to
include non-violent burglaries and criminal trespasses, as well as
juvenile adjudications for offenses equivalent to burglary and trespass --
will not be race neutral in application if minority offenders are
disproportionately the subjects of the juvenile justice system,
disproportionately prosecuted for burglary and trespass, and are
disproportionately convicted.
But
this is what a recent study by the National Council on Crime and
Delinquency suggests.
More
black defendants will have a history of felony convictions than white
defendants, for the same conduct. And the more racially isolated and
fearful the jury, the more likely they are to deem that history
"significant" and to find it decisive as a basis to sentence the
defendant to die.
And
so it goes. The influence of race permeates the death penalty, in
Philadelphia and nationally.
Its
pernicious effects have placed defendants on death row who, but for their
race, would have been spared death, and perhaps acquitted. And even where
its effects cannot be quantified, the specter of discrimination undermines
confidence that justice will, or even can, be done in capital cases, and
in the integrity of the judicial process.
Robert Dunham is the director of training for the
Capital Habeas Unit of the Pennsylvania Capital Representation Project of
the Philadelphia Federal Defender.
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