Charges of racism offer new evidence in Texas

Race played a "real" role in deciding who was sentenced to death in hundreds of capital trials over a seven-year period in one Texas county, according to new academic research to be published shortly. Black defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death than white ones, according to Scott Phillips, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver. Blacks were also more likely to be sent to death row for murders which were less heinous than those committed by whites. "My research suggests that those (racial) disparities are real," Phillips told IPS. The full study will be published in the Houston Law Review this autumn. Phillips examined the impact of race in some 504 cases where the Harris County public prosecutor sought the death penalty between 1992 and 1999. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the US in 1976, Harris County has been responsible for 102 of the country's 1,100 executions -- more than any US state other than Texas itself. Phillips found that in Harris County, "death was more likely to be imposed against black defendants than white defendants." For every 100 black defendants and every 100 white defendants, an average of five more blacks were sentenced to death than whites. The ratio was 17 to 12. Evidence of racial discrimination in seeking the death penalty was also found when comparing capital trials on the basis of the vulnerability of the victims and the brutality of the crime. The criteria of the gravity of the crime before seeking the death penalty were set higher for whites. "The racial disparity emerged after controlling for the seriousness of the crime," Phillips said. "To impose equal punishment against unequal crime is to impose unequal punishment," he writes in his study. "This is certainly a disturbing result," Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, commented to IPS. "Harris County is where some of the worst problems have occurred. The head prosecutors choose to seek it (the death penalty) in almost every eligible case." "It doesn't surprise me," Taft Foley, director of legal advocacy for the Houston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told IPS. Statistics from Harris County also showed that the death penalty "was more likely to be imposed on behalf of white victims than black victims." This particular finding was "commonplace" and showed up in more than 20 studies around the nation, the New York Times reported on Apr. 29. "We tend to racially cheerlead whether we are conscious of it or not," Taft commented, citing black stereotypes which inspired fear as the reason for this. "When you look at the white-victim cases with black defendants, these are usually the most feared crimes in the community," Dieter added. "Prosecutors are white and juries are white. I don't know if it is intentional, they look at that defendant as a danger. It tips the scales when you mix race into it." The Harris County District Attorney's Office declined to comment directly on Phillips' yet unpublished study when contacted by IPS. But Scott Durfee, the general council for the office, insisted that the decision on drawing up charges was "race-neutral". Procedures had remained unchanged since the early 1980s. "The District Attorney evaluates the quality of the evidence, the likelihood of success at the trial and on appeal, and whether justice would be done...by pursuing the death penalty," he told IPS. Statistical evidence of clear racial disparities in meting out capital punishment cannot be used in the US to block executions. In 1987 the US Supreme Court ruled in the McCleskey v. Kemp case that such evidence did not violate the constitution. The ruling was a close five-to-four. The McCleskey v. Kemp ruling has always been highly criticized. This latest evidence of racial disparities in the way death penalties are passed down is bound to put the ruling under more intense scrutiny. Only last April, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, calling for a reconsideration of the "justification of the death penalty", referred back to the case after casting his vote giving the green light for lethal injections to go ahead once more in the US Executions had been on hold for seven months while the Court heard challenges to the constitutionality of lethal injections. The "significant concern" of the risk of discrimination had been "dramatically" reduced since the McCleskey v. Kemp case, Justice Stevens said. But the Court had allowed the risk of discrimination to continue to play an "unacceptable role in capital cases," he said, seeming to distance himself from this ruling. Activists campaigning against the death penalty in the US are likely to await the publication of the Phillips study with keen interest.