(source6)

Death penalty opponents have long feared that blacks would be put to death more fequently than whites. However, several studies suggest that the most significant tie to race has been the race of the victim. For example, if you murder someone, your chances of being sentenced to death may very well depend upon the color of your victim.

If your victim was white, you'd have about a one in ten chance of being executed.
If your victim was black, you'd only have a one in hundred chance of being executed.(source3)

This disparity shows that the judicial system places more value on the lives of whites than blacks. Even though only about half of all murder victims are white, about 85% of those on death row had white victims. (source1)
And of the

(source1)

The bias does not necessarily occur when the juries decide whether to recommend death. Often, the disparities arise from earlier decisions by prosecutors, like whether to allow the defendant to plead guilty to a lesser charge or whether to ask for the death penalty at all.

The disparities are concentrated among certain kinds of cases that make up about 1/4 to 1/5 of all murder cases. In the most grisly cases, such as multiple murders, death sentences are frequent regardless of race. And the death penalty is rarely imposed, regardless of race, for crimes of passion or barroom brawls. However, murders that fall into the middle ground, like the 18-year-old kid who panics in a convenience store robbery, or murder by a person with a serious felony record, are where biases are more likely to creep in.

Because of its size and detail, the most persuasive evidence of bias comes from a study of Georgia in the 1970's led by Dr. Baldus. Looking at 1,050 murder cases, researchers tried to weed out the influence of 39 factors that might affect penalties, from the past record of the defendant to whether the killing was committed in the course of another crime like robbery or rape, to the motives and means of the killing.

After those factors are eliminated, Mr. Baldus said, a clear racial effect remained: when the murder victim was white, the chance of a death penalty was roughly doubled in certain kinds of cases. (Those falling into that middle ground mentioned above.)

* In Missouri, Judge Earl Blackwell issued a signed press release about his judicial election announcing his new affiliation with the Republican Party while presiding over a death penalty case against an unemployed African-American defendant. The press release stated, in part: "[T]he Democrat party places far too much emphasis on representing minorities . . . people who dont' (sic) want to work, and people with a skin that's any color but white . . . ." The judge denied a motion to recuse himself from the trial. The defendant, Brian Kinder, was convicted and sentenced to death, and Missouri's Supreme Court affirmed in 1996.

These examples are symbolic of a more systemic racism, and they provide a sense of how damaging racial prejudice and insensitivity can be when someone is facing execution. Empirical studies which provide the national evidence of racism in capital punishment are critical to understanding that this problem goes far beyond individual examples of prejudice.

The racial disparities that have been found could be the result of conscious choices by police, prosecutors, judges, and jurors to discriminate against killers of whites or in favor of killers of blacks. Yet is seems unlikely that the observed racial disparities are due entirely to deliberate acts of discrimination by the individual jurors or public officials involved in these cases.

While relatively few people may hold overtly racist attitudes, many show the effects of subtler prejudices. For example, in a 1981 survey, 31 percent of white respondents preferred not to have blacks as neighbors. This type of prejudice could have subtle but serious effects on individual's interpretations of the facts in a legal case, and on their emotional and moral responses to the defendant, the victim, and the crime.

Numerous psychological experiments have established that individuals' attitudes and stereotypes affect their perceptions of others and their interpretations of events. Stereotypes have been found to influence the way people allocate their attention, how they interpret what they perceive, and how they recall the information they remember. These biases translate into actions. For example, people have been found to be more willing to help strangers who are members of their own race than those who are not, and they are more likely to help people who appear similiar to them in other ways. Birt Duncan has demonstrated that whites interpret ambiguous actions performed by blacks to be more violent than identical actions performed by whites.

As the jurors review the circumstances of the crime, they will inevitably consider the personal characteristics of the defendant , and the defendants race might carry some weight; but the jurors might be able counteract the effect of that characteristic. They know that discrimination against blacks is a major issue in our society, and most jurors (though not all) will probably try to exclude racial considerations from their evaluation of the defendant. They may or may not succeed, but at least they are likely to be aware of the problem. Furthermore, the defendant - white or black - is not like them. He belongs to a very different class of person; he is a murderer. Regardless of his race, the jurors will probably not see him as similiar to themselves, and he is unlikely to benefit from the favoritism that people show to similiar others.

The race of the victim is a different matter. In most cases the jurors undoubtably feel unqualified sympathy for the dead victims and for their survivors, whatever their race. But that is true in all types of homicides; it takes more than sympathy for the victim for the jurors to condemn a murderer to death. They must feel personally threatened by the defendant or what he represents, or they must be horrified by the defendant's acts.

There is, undoubtably, wide variation among jurors both in the degree and in the type of horror or fear that will tip the balance toward death. Particular gruesome facts will be more terrifying to some than to others. But one influential process cuts across this uneven range; we are more readily horrified by a death if we empathize or identify with the victim, or if we see the victim as similiar to ourselves or to a friend or relative, than if the victim appears to us as a stranger. In a society that remains segregated socially if not legally, and in which the great majority of jurors are white, jurors are not likely to identify with black victims or to see them as family or friends. The jurors are more likely to be horrified by the killing of a white than of a black, and more likely to act against the killer of a white than the killer of a black.

Jurors, of course, are not the only actors in the legal system who determine whether a capital defendant will be sentenced to death. More often than not jurors play no direct role in those decisions because potentially capital cases are weeded out before they come to trial, primarily at the hands of the prosecutors. There is no reason to believe that judges and attorneys are immune to the effects of the psychological processes that we have discussed. But even if these professional decision makers are able to counteract some of their own biases, their decisions in a capital case will be influenced by their predictions of the jury's reaction to it. Death penalty cases require large allocations of scarce prosecutorial resources, so prosectutors must choose a small number of cases to receive this expensive treatment. In making these choices, prosecutors will try to avoid wasting resources and losing expensive battles that they can sidestep. They may also favor homicides that are visible and disturbing to the majority of the community, and these will tend to be white-victim homicides. This means, as Justice White observed in his concurring opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, that "prosecutors will be motivated in their charging decision by ... the likelihood that a jury would impose the death penalty if it convicts." The operating force in this process is prediction, and its effects are not restricted to legitimate jury behavior.