Death Penalty - News, Thoughts, Info

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Gemme

I was referencing situations in which the person, regardless of color, gender, or religion, has been proven guilty.

Issues of whether the United States exhibits the cultural maturity to actually exercise the death penalty to the side, my concern is not that we will execute the right people, it's that we will execute the wrong people. No one who is not convicted of a crime faces the death penalty, the problem is that in about a third of those cases it turns out the wrong person was convicted. As inconvenient as those cases are for proponents of the death penalty they should concern us and my view of the death penalty is seen through the lens of wrongful conviction and disparate treatment.

When we don't abstract this out but place it in the context of the real world, what we are talking about is a legal system that, left to its own devices, will kill black at up to four times the rate of white men holding every other relevant factor constant. When THAT is corrected and a black man is no more likely to receive the death penalty than a white man, I might be persuadable but at present, given the reality of the American criminal justice system as it is and not as we might like it to be I know that what we are talking about is a system that will fall most heavily on black and Hispanic men.

Cheers
Aj