Race and capital punishment in the United States

Since 1991, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has produced quarterly reports containing statistics related to capital punishment in the United States.

Those allegations resulted in the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp that statistical evidence of bias in the criminal justice system is insufficient to overturn an individual's sentence.

[2] In 1998, Baldus published another study which concluded that black defendants in certain types of murder cases in Philadelphia were almost four times as likely to be sentenced to death than were their white counterparts.

[16] A 1987 study by M. Dwayne Smith of Tulane University found a racial bias in capital punishment cases in Louisiana, but only with regard to the race of the victim, not the offender.

"[19] A 1995 study by Jonathan Sorensen and Donald H. Wallace found evidence of a racial bias in capital punishment in Missouri, mainly in regards to the race of the victim.

[23] A study by Butler et al published in 2018 failed to replicate the findings of earlier studies that had concluded that white Americans are more likely to support the death penalty if informed that it is largely applied to black Americans; according to the authors, their findings "may result from changes since 2001 in the effects of racial stimuli on white attitudes about the death penalty or their willingness to express those attitudes in a survey context.

"[24] Racial and ethnic disparities in the employment of the death sentence have been significant in scope over the long arc of American history.

[25] Local law enforcement and segregated juries continued to be pillars of racial discipline for a century after the Civil War.

This case highlights three aspects of the history of police torture of African Americans which inevitably led to biased punishment.

[29] This exemplifies how Southern racial culture profoundly influenced the application of the death penalty and discrimination against African Americans during the Jim Crow era, attributable to societal biases.

[citation needed] Due to the link between capital punishment and African Americans in the United States, violence had a large impact on the death sentence.

There is ample proof that white supremacists exploited violence and made lynching a public spectacle to gain total control over the black population during the Jim Crow era.

Essentially, violence and lynching were tactics employed to uphold racial caste divisions and put black individuals in a subservient position.

Due to the numerous atrocities that Southern racial culture perpetrated against African Americans throughout the Jim Crow era, extreme implications came to fruition.