As a result of thousands of people mobilizing around the world, Troy Davis—an innocent man on death row—has been granted a stay of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court. His fate remains in the balance, as the Supreme Court hears the evidence of his case.
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Yet Davis’s struggle for justice is not unique. Death penalty cases often involve arbitrary judgments that have little to do with actual evidence. The death penalty is generally reserved for poor and working people, but the disproportionate targeting of African Americans is particularly shocking. In Georgia, where Davis was tried, one is 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death if convicted of killing a white person than if convicted of killing a Black person, and nationwide a Black man is 11 times more likely to receive the death penalty if convicted of killing a white person.
A black-and-white issue
The racial undertones in death penalty cases indeed make it a modern-day form of lynching. Lynching—including the tortures, killing and mutilation of Black people—was common from the Civil War up to the civil rights movement, particularly in the apartheid post-Reconstruction South. Lynching was used as a method of terrorizing the Black population to quell agitation for equal rights.
Today, the death penalty plays the same repressive role with the sanction of the state. African Americans make up less than 14 percent of the U.S. population, yet according to a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, 34 percent of all individuals executed since 1976 were Black. The same report shows that African Americans also make up 42 percent of inmates on death row.
The same states that historically had the most lynchings are also the states where the most people are executed. In addition, several studies have shown that the odds of receiving the death sentence increase by 300 to 400 percent if the victim is white, as compared to Black or Latino. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, roughly 80 percent of execution sentences involved a white victim, even though only around 50 percent of murder victims are white nationwide.
In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, although death row prisoner Warren McClesky had proven in his defense that the death penalty was racist, executing him would not be a violation of the Constitution. McClesky was executed by electrocution in 1991.
Death penalty laws have been designed to deny justice to the sentenced. Clemency, which can result in a death sentence being commuted to life in prison, often requires an admission of guilt.
This catch-22 ultimately led to the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams in 2005. Williams, known the Los Angeles street gang known as the Crips, was convicted of murdering four people in 1979. During his 24 years in prison, he turned his life around and worked as an advocate for peace in the streets between Black and Latino street gangs.
The day before Williams was executed, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency for Williams. Schwarzenegger argued that, since Williams maintained that he was innocent, he had not demonstrated the level of remorse and redemption needed to justify clemency.
Struggle against death penalty is struggle against racism
The struggle to expose the racist character of the death penalty has made great progress, yet much remains to be done. A poll indicates that support for the death penalty fell from 80 percent in 1994 to 65 percent in May 2006. The 2006 figures indicate that, despite the drop in support, more than half of the people in the United States still supported the death penalty, believed it was not imposed frequently enough, and believed it was applied fairly.
The prevalence of such widespread, fatal misconceptions within the U.S. working class are the product of gross distortions aimed at promoting racism. Politicians and the corporate media join hands to divide the working class through the criminalization of Black people by promoting the death penalty as a “crime deterrent.”
The death penalty is little more than a tool for the continued oppression of poor and working people, and above all the African American population. It engineers divisions among working people by unjustly stigmatizing people of color as violent criminals. It directs legally sanctioned terror at oppressed communities and seeks to chill political organizing.
It is the duty of all revolutionaries and progressive people to expose the racism inherent in the death penalty and the whole capitalist justice system. The abolition of the death penalty would eradicate a key instrument of state terror. Above all, the struggle against the death penalty is a struggle to tear down the walls of racism, a prerequisite for building a truly multinational revolutionary movement.
