Killers of white people were more than four times as likely to be sentenced to death as killers of Black people, Professor Baldus found. Professor Baldus’s study examined more than 2,000 murders in Georgia from 1973 to 1979, controlling for some 230 variables. Its conclusions were similarly striking. The study looked primarily at the race of the victim in each murder case in o… It looked at death sentences rather than executions, and it made two basic points. The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. There is little chance that the new findings would alter the current Supreme Court’s support for the death penalty. This chapter further describes the important research on race and the death penalty completed by David Baldus, Charles Pulaski Jr., and George Woodworth. To review, the Study concluded that the race of the victim, but not that of the defendant, was an important factor in determining whether a capital defendant received the death penalty. It found that 22 of the 972 defendants convicted of killing a white victim were executed, as compared with two of the 1,503 defendants convicted of killing a Black victim. [W]e hold that the Baldus study is clearly insufficient to support an inference that any of the decisionmakers in McCleskey’s case acted with discriminatory purpose.12 Though some have argued that Professor Baldus did not consider every possible variable, few question his bottom-line conclusion, and other studies have confirmed it. “It is a declaration that African-American life has no value which white men are bound to respect. In a previous post, I summarized the Baldus Study of the role of race in Georgia’s system of capital sentencing during the 1970s. In 1991, after he retired, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the author of the majority opinion, was asked whether there was any vote he would like to change. Soon, McCleskey’s case of McCleskey v. Its conservative majority has expressed impatience with efforts to block executions, and last month it issued a pair of 5-to-4 rulings in the middle of the night that allowed federal executions to resume after a 17-year hiatus.
In 1990, the General Accounting Office, now called the Government Accountability Office, reviewed 28 studies and determined that 23 of them found that the race of the victim influenced “the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving a death sentence.”. “This finding was remarkably consistent across data sets, states, data collection methods and analytic techniques,” the report said. “That the murder of Black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynchings,” he wrote that year in The New York Review of Books. “McCleskey is the Dred Scott decision of our time,” Anthony G. Amsterdam, a law professor at New York University, said in a 2007 speech. The Baldus study is actually two One factor Professor Baldus could not analyze, given the decades that often pass between sentencings and executions, was whether the race of the victim correlated to the likelihood of the defendant being put to death. It is a decision for which our children’s children will reproach our generation and abhor the legal legacy we leave them.”. . “The continuing adherence of the Supreme Court to McCleskey is a continuing statement that Black lives do not matter,” he said. The second was that the race of the victim does. About 46 percent of the victims were Black, but only 15 percent of defendants who were executed had killed a Black person. Instead, he relies solely on the Baldus study. Building on data at the heart of a landmark 1987 Supreme Court decision, the study concluded that defendants convicted of killing white victims were executed at a rate 17 times greater than those convicted of killing Black victims. The study analyzed over 2000 murder cases occurring in the state of Georgia in the 1970s. A 2014 update came to a similar conclusion. . “McCleskey v. Kemp.”. It looked at death sentences rather than executions, and it made two basic points. In 1983 David C. Baldus, along with Charles A. Pulaski and George Woodworth, published a study examining the presence of racial discrimination in death penalty sentencing. One of the dissenters in the case, Justice John Paul Stevens, was still stewing over it after his own retirement in 2010.
The new study, published in The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, examined not only death sentences but also whether defendants sentenced to death were eventually executed. David C. Baldus, Charles Pulaski, George Woodworth, Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience, 74 J. Crim. Although courts rejected early statistical studies for being incomplete, a more thorough landmark study would be used in Warren McCleskey’s case. “It’s more that the United States has a race problem that happens to infect the death penalty.”, A Vast Racial Gap in Death Penalty Cases, New Study Finds.
Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra, said courts and lawmakers had failed to confront the question of racial bias in the administration of capital punishment.
The new study, the product of exhaustive research, supplied the missing information. sentence. . Members of the Abolitionist Action Committee participated in an annual protest and hunger strike against the death penalty outside the Supreme Court last year. “It’s not necessarily that the death penalty has a race problem,” he said. Defendants convicted of killing white people, the study found, were far more likely to be executed than the killers of Black people. “The continuing failure of Congress and the state legislatures to remedy the situation is a continuing admission that the states are unable to run racially unbiased death penalty systems.”. The cases examined by Baldus all occurred between two United States Supreme Court cases involving Georgia: Furman v. Georgia (1972) and McCleskey v. Kemp(1987). Opponents of the death penalty have been deeply critical of the decision, comparing it to the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling that enslaved Black people were property and not citizens. The McCleskey decision considered a study conducted by David C. Baldus, a law professor who died in 2011. McCleskey argues that the Baldus study compels an inference that his sentence rests on purposeful discrimination. The Baldus study Professors David C. Baldus, Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth (the Baldus study) shows a disparity in the imposition of the death sentence in Georgia based on the race of the murder victim and, to a lesser extent, the race of the defendant. About half of the victims were white, that study found, but three-quarters of defendants put to death had killed a white person. Baldus' study concluded that all individuals convicted of murdering whites were far more likely to receive the death penalty, thus establishing that the application of the death penalty in Georgia was linked with the race of the victim. . By a 5-to-4 vote, the court ruled that even solid statistical evidence of race discrimination in the capital justice system did not offend the Constitution.
The first was that the race of the defendant does not predict the likelihood of a death sentence.
The Baldus study was at the heart of a 1987 Supreme Court case, McCleskey v. Kemp, in which Warren McCleskey, a Black man sentenced to death in Georgia in the killing of a white police officer, challenged Georgia’s death penalty on the ground that it was racially biased.