Study Reveals Racially Biased Death Sentencing in U.S. Military

• by Kanya D'Almeida (washington)
• Thursday, September 01, 2011
• Inter Press Service

While the meting out of capital punishment in civilian courts has been closely documented since the Supreme Court reinstated the controversial sanction in 1976, little was known about the extent of racial prejudice and discrimination in the military justice system until now.

The study, co-authored by the late David Baldus, an eminent scholar on the subject of capital punishment, and Catherine Grosso, an associate professor of law at Michigan State University's College of Law, found that 10 of the 16 men whom the military has sentenced to death since the early 1980s share a common trait: they're all minorities.

In fact, the research, conducted by a team of legal experts and statistics professors, proves that minorities in the military are twice as likely as their white counterparts to be sentenced to death by capital punishment — a statistic that is higher than existing levels of racism in the civilian courts.

This imbalance is by no means a new trend. For the last three decades the military has both exercised and acknowledged bias in its judicial system. However, the study concluded that the military's efforts to reform its justice system after 1986 'failed to purge the risk of racial prejudice from the administration of the death penalty'.

Slated to be released later this year in the peer-reviewed Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the study's authors stressed, 'There is substantial evidence that many actors in the American criminal justice system are… influenced by the race of defendants and their victims.'

The professors found that 'capital punishment-racial discrimination studies of state death penalty systems have documented three types of evidence of racial disparities in the treatment of similarly situated death-eligible offenders', the most common being punitive measures meted out to any defendant in cases involving white victims; the next common being cases involving black or minority defendants thought to have perpetrated a crime against a white victim; and lastly cases involving black and minority defendants thought to have committed a crime, regardless of the victim's ethnicity.

Having raked through data on the administration of the death penalty in the U.S. armed forces between 1984 and 2005, the study presents evidence that the 16 cases of death sentences support Supreme Court Justice Byron White's hypothesis that 'in death eligible murder cases, the greatest risk of 'racial prejudice' exists in highly aggravated minority-accused/white-victim cases.'

Of those 16 cases, the study also found that race appeared especially to be a factor in five cases that involved multiple victims with at least one victim who was white.

Those cases include three black men currently on death row - Ronald Gray, a black former Army private who was accused of raping and murdering four women; Dwight Loving, a black former Army private at Fort Hood, Texas, who was convicted of killing two taxi drivers; and Kenneth Parker, a black former Marine lance corporal who allegedly killed two white Marines 'following rumors that a group of white males had planned a lynching'.

'What this study shows us is the racial discrimination that we have seen in civil systems for decades is just as rampant — even more so — in the military,' Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), told IPS.

'While most previous studies have suggested that the race of the victim was the most salient factor affecting death penalty decisions, this latest study proves that the race of the defendant matters just as much, if not more,' he said.

Though the study stresses that the racially lopsided numbers of people on death row are not the result of 'intentional discrimination', Dieter said that the third level of racism — following legally sanctioned discrimination and deliberately harsh sentencing based on race — fell in a murky middle ground that was hard to define.

'All kinds of cultural differences and prejudices exist in individuals who are tasked with assigning a suspect as innocent or guilty,' Dieter told IPS. 'These judgments creep in, perhaps not intentionally, but inevitably.'

'Sadly, judgments are never made on pure formulas, but are always influenced by the biases, upbringing and cultural histories of judges and jurors,' he added. 'So it is to be expected that an all-white jury would view and sentence a black defendant more harshly than an all-black jury would.'

Dieter added that the civilian system too was nursing extreme racial disparities. Of the 58 people on federal death row, 23 are white while 35 — roughly 60 percent — are minorities.

And while 44 percent of those on state death rows are white, compared to 42 percent black and 12 percent Hispanic — statistics that many tout as evidence of the playing field being leveled out — Dieter cautioned, 'We have to keep in mind that blacks only make up 12 percent of the U.S.'s total population, making these numbers very skewed no matter which way you look at them.'

Given that neither state, federal, nor military judicial systems seem able to leave racial bias at the door of the courtroom, some have suggested that the study is simply more evidence that the death penalty should be abolished in all 50 states.

According to Amnesty International's 2010 report on death penalties, the U.S. has the fourth worst track record in the world for executions - with 42 people going to the chair last year alone — following China, Iran and North Korea.

As a New York Times editorial pointed out Thursday morning, 'The last military execution was in 1961. This de facto moratorium has not made the country or the military less secure. The evidence of persistent racial bias is further evidence that it is time for the military system to abolish the death penalty.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service