I chose to respond to a post from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog, “The Atlantic”, called, “The Inhumanity of the Death Penalty”. Link: (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/the-inhumanity-of-the-death-penalty/361991/)
Overall, this post focuses on the inhumanity of capital punishment in America. Featured in the cover picture is George Stinney, a 14 year-old African American boy, the youngest American ever subjected to the death penalty. He was convicted and executed by electric chair in 1944 by the State of South Carolina. The whole trial lasted two hours and due to segregation, was exclusively white. In 2013, supporters of Stinney sought for his exoneration but came to no avail.
This case intersects with some long running dissension in the American legal system – capital punishment and race. Coates argues that, “Citing racism in our justice system isn’t mere shaming, it’s a call for humility and self-awareness, which presently evades us.”
In his post, he references the disparities between executions of black and white soldiers during the Civil War and even into World War II. He cites law professor Elizabeth Hilman who writes, “African Americans comprised 10% of the armed forces but accounted for almost 80% of the soldiers executed during the war”. These numbers are disturbing and do not get the attention they deserve. I then started to wonder what the demographical figures for capital punishment in America are today. Unsurprisingly, the death penalty remains severely tainted by racial bias.
In 2011, a “New York Times” article, “Death Penalty, Still Racist and Arbitrary” by David Dow, reported that since 1976, Texas had carried out 470 executions (well more than a third of the national total of 1,257) and not one of them involved a white murderer and a black victim. They found from a study in Georgia that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants and that murderers of white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed black victims.
For me, examining capital punishment and the racial disproportion of executions (in 1998, a study found that 97.5% of District Attorneys were white while only 1.2% were black[i]), clearly demonstrates the need for serious change not only within our justice system but also within American society. It is through the works of prominent African American and Black Studies intellects, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, that we can work towards a post-racial society.