An official act of racism
by digby
I'm horrified by the death penalty for many reasons. It's simply immoral to premeditatedly kill people who are in the custody of authorities and are no threat to anyone. When the system that put them there is capricious, unequal and unjust it's even worse. I will never understand how people can consider it a civilized act to murder someone who is shackled and unarmed.
But the absolutely most horrific aspect of capital punishment in America is the way it is used as an official, governmental act of racism. In the name of all of us:
IN APRIL 2005, nearly eight years after Kenneth Fults was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murdering his neighbor Cathy Bounds in Spalding County, Georgia, one of the trial jurors made a startling admission under oath: He'd voted for the death penalty, he said, because "that's what that nigger deserved."
It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, given the circumstances—a black man admitting to the murder of a white woman in the deep South—that some white jurors might secretly harbor racist views. The surprising part was that this juror, Thomas Buffington, came right out and said it. And what should have been the most surprising development of all (alas, it wasn't) came this past August, when a federal appeals court, presented with ample evidence, refused to consider how racism might have affected Fults' fate.
In fact, state and federal courts have routinely avoided the evidence and consequences of racism in the criminal-justice system. (See "5 Death Penalty Cases Tainted by Racism.") Consider one of the most famous examples, the 1987 Supreme Court case of McCleskey v. Kemp, in which lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to death for killing a white police officer, presented statistics from more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases. The data demonstrated a clear bias against black defendants whose victims were white: When both killer and victim were black, only 1 percent of the cases resulted in a death sentence. When the killer was black and the victim white, 22 percent were sentenced to death—more than seven times the rate for when the races were reversed.
It's sick. Jim Crow may have ended and a whole lot of our fellow citizens are better off, but its racist intentions just moved to a new space behind prison walls.
I wish I could understand how any judge could be so cold-blooded as the allow an execution under these circumstances. I know they care about making "the system" efficient and worry in the abstract about what will happen if they start tinkering too much with the machinery of death. But this machine is designed to snare the innocent along with the guilty and it seems to have a need for black bodies to fuel it. It's a machine that doesn't work properly and never will. It needs to be scrapped.
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