The American colonies began executing convicted criminals in the early 1600s. Capital punishment was a part of contemporary English society, although colonists eventually keyed in on first-degree murder as the main justification for execution. In the 1800s, scores of people began to oppose the practice. Western European anti-execution activists saw great success following World War II, an event during which too many people died unnecessarily. One by one, countries abolished the death penalty until the United States was the only remaining superpower to endorse executing criminals.
Public protests grew in the mid-1900s, and in 1968, the federal government established an unofficial moratorium. Four years later, the Supreme Court codified this stoppage in Furman v. Georgia, declaring capital punishment unconstitutional. This prompted several states to create their own laws permitting the death penalty as a workaround. In 1977, executions resumed under this patchwork of new laws, many of which were subject to Supreme Court decisions.
During McCleskey v. Kemp in 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that statistical, racial disparities in death penalty application were not sufficient to invalidate the punishment. That decisions opened the floodgates for a huge increase in executions.
In 1998, the numbers of new death sentences peaked at over 300. A year later, executions peaked at 98. Ever since, capital punishment in sentencing and in practice has steadily declined to 34 and 22 in 2019, respectively. Despite this drop-off, we’ve seen an uptick in racial disparities concerning the application of the death penalty.
Those disproportionate impacts exist at every level of the capital punishment process. We apologize in advance for all the figures listed below.
Since 1977, 308 Black defendants have been executed for murdering at least one white victim while 34 white defendants were executed for murders involving at least one Black victim. In 294 of the former cases, juries sentenced Black convicts to death for murders only involving white victims while only 21 of the latter cases involved only Black victims. The application of the death penalty is such that Black people are put to death at a higher rate for murdering only white people than vice versa.
Almost half of all murder victims are Black, but in 2019, 27 of 34 new death sentences came in cases where the victim was white. The same disparity holds true for executions as well. Around 73% of all executions in 2019 involved only white victims.
Of course, this starts with juries and their sentencing habits. Over half of those sentenced to the death penalty were people of color in 2019. In 1980, that figure was only 45.6%. The percentage of white prisoners on death row has been dropping steadily for decades now and shows no sign of slowing down.
There was a time when our country came close to abolishing the death penalty. But then states, mostly in the South, couldn’t bear to part with it. Ever since, it’s been a tool of systemic oppression and overincarceration. We have an obligation to highlight such disparate applications of the law and oppose them. Our criminal justice system is flawed enough, something the country has become more cognizant of in the last year and a half. It’s high time we remove its ability to deliberate killing its constituents, given our institution’s ingrained racism.
