Africans vs. The Death Penalty
...Death Penalty is not racist is to be blinded by the facts. According to DOJ figures, nearly 80 percent of inmates on federal death row are Black, Hispanic or from another minority group. Minorities account for 74 percent of the cases in which federal prosecutors seek the death penalty. Texas has also been scrutinized for the intolerable behavior of women and mentally retarded people. Racism plays a huge role in determining who dies in Texas. In one example, Texas law enforcement authorities picked Clarence Lee Brandley, from many other suspects in a case of rape and murder of a white woman. as authorities told Brandley- convicted but released in 1989 after being exonerated-"You're the nigger, so you're elected" (Clair, 2). Dallas has sent dozens of people to death row but never for killing an African American. Harris County, in Houston, alone is home to 40 percent of all African Americans in Texas on death row. Blacks make up only 20 percent of the county's population but about two-thirds of its death row inmates. But we are talking about racism and the death penalty here. When one looks at the death penalty, that is who gets it and in which cases the state seeks it, someone can only wonder why any Blacks support it. If one looks at the death penalty, she or he finds a majority of the people on the death rows are Black, even in states like Pennsylvania where Blacks are less than 10% of the population. Also the majority of cases where the government seeks the death penalty are in cases with white victims. Hidden within those statistics is the message that black life is cheap and not worth anything, and white life is valued more than any other. That is racism, genocide, and pure ignorance. Not many whites and even Klan members have been put to death for the murder of a black person. Not one of the murderous cops who have shot Black people down in the streets or choked them to death in jail cells or police cruisers been sentenced to death. Yet on the flip side death rows are full of Black and poor people all over this land. That fact is that this system should never put anyone to death; this government is not morally fit to take anyone's life, no matter how murderous they are. Though I have given many points about how racism plays an active role in the death penalty there are people who actually support the complete opposite. These people have done a lot of research. One article I read is, Myth of Racism in Death Penalty, by David Andrew Price. He stated that, the evidence indicates black murder defendants are no more likely to get death sentences than are whites, although at the end of 1996, 42 percent of death row inmates were African-Americans. That is because in 43.2 percent of violent crime cases in 1996, and 54.9 percent of all murder cases, the perpetrators were African-Americans according to federal statistics (Price, 1). That is because the American society and government set up the society so that black people will fail and turn to crime. Yet he states that whites have about...