Blatant Racism is seen and heard too often in the courtrooms in the country. In death penalty cases, the use of derogatory slurs kindles the flames of prejudice and allows the jury to judge harshly those they wish to scapegoat for the problem of crime. Capital Punishment is racially biased, includes risks in killing innocent people, and is inhumane.
The race of the defendant is not supposed to influence whether a person is sentenced to death. Throughout history, race has figured heavily in the death penalty. . Before the Civil War, the slave codes mandated execution for any black who murdered a white, but allowed a mere fine for any white who killed a black. Postwar laws continued to require different sentences based on the race of the victim. Today, long after our laws have been stripped of such overt discrimination, the death penalty continues to be reserved overwhelmingly for cases where the victim is white. In the U.S, African Americans make up 12% of the population but 40% of death row. According to the Death Row statistics, if the victim was white the murderer would have one in ten chance of being executed, but if the victim was black the murder would only have one in a hundred chance of being executed. The death penalty must be imposed fairly and with reasonable consistency or not at all.