Re: Race is likely to determine DP (NY Times)

On Apr 29, 11:35 am, Peter Dworkin <pe...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
ADAM LIPTAK  |  Sidebar  APR. 29, 2008

A New Look at Race When Death Is Sought

About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last
three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts
for more than 100 of those executions. Indeed, Harris County has sent
more people to the death chamber than any state but Texas itself.
Yet Harris County’s capital justice system has not been the subject of
intensive research — until now. A new study to be published in The
Houston Law Review this fall has found two sorts of racial disparities
in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and
one surprising.

The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more
likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than
20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.
But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It
found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in
explaining who is sentenced to death.

It has never been conclusively proven that, all else being equal,
blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites in the
three decades since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in
1976. Many experts, including some opposed to the death penalty, have
said that evidence of that sort of direct discrimination is spotty and
equivocal.

[Snide and non-specific note: This study doesn't change that one
bit.]

But the author of the new study, Scott Phillips, a professor of
sociology and criminology at the University of Denver, found a robust
relationship between race and the likelihood of being sentenced to
death even after the race of the victim and other factors were held
constant.

His statistics have profound implications. For every 100 black
defendants and 100 white defendants indicted for capital murder in
Harris County, Professor Phillips found that an average of 12 white
defendants and 17 black ones would be sent to death row. In other
words, Professor Phillips wrote, “five black defendants would be
sentenced to the ultimate sanction because of race.”



Scott Durfee, the general counsel for the Harris County district
attorney’s office, rejected Professor Phillips’s conclusions and said
that district attorneys there had long taken steps to insulate
themselves from knowing the race of defendants and victims as they
decided whether to seek the death penalty.

 “To the extent Professor Phillips indicates otherwise, all we can say
is that you would have to look at each individual case,” Mr. Durfee
said. “If you do that, I’m fairly sure that you would see that the
decision was rational and reasonable.”

Indeed, the raw numbers support Mr. Durfee.
John B. Holmes Jr., the district attorney in the years Professor
Phillips studied, 1992 to 1999, asked for the death sentence against
27 percent of the white defendants, 25 percent of the Hispanic
defendants and 25 percent of the black defendants. (Professor Phillips
studied 504 defendants indicted for the murders of 614 people. About
half of the defendants were black; a quarter each were white and
Hispanic.)

Mr. Holmes was, Professor Phillips said, selective but effective: he
asked for the death sentence against 129 defendants and obtained 98.)
But Professor Phillips said that the numbers suggesting evenhandedness
in seeking the death penalty did not tell the whole story. Once the
kinds of murders committed by black defendants were taken into
consideration — terrible, to be sure, but on average less heinous,
less apt to involve vulnerable victims and brutality, and less often
committed by an adult — “the bar appears to have been set lower for
pursuing death against black defendants,” Professor Phillips
concluded.

Professor Phillips wrote about percentages and not particular cases,
but his data suggest that black defendants were overrepresented in
cases involving shootings during robberies, while white defendants
were more likely to have committed murders during rapes and
kidnappings and to have beaten, stabbed or choked their victims.
When the nature of the crime is taken into account, Professor Phillips
wrote, “the odds of a death trial are 1.75 times higher against black
defendants than white defendants.” Harris County juries corrected for
that disparity to an extent, so that the odds of a death sentence for
black defendants after trial dropped to 1.49.

Jon Sorensen, a professor of justice studies at Prairie View A&M
University in Texas, said he was suspicious of Professor Phillips’s
methodology.

“It’s bizarre,” Professor Sorensen said. “It starts out with no
evidence of racism. Then he controls for stuff.”

 Moreover, Professor Sorensen said, Professor Phillips failed to take
account of other significant factors, including the socioeconomic
status of the victims.

Professor Sorensen said he remained convinced that racial disparities,
if they exist at all, “are victim-based only,” as earlier studies have
found.

This discussion, at least where the courts are concerned, is entirely
academic. Twenty-one years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that even
solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration
of the death penalty did not offend the Constitution. The vote was 5
to 4, and the case was  McCleskey v. Kemp.

That ruling closed off what had seemed to opponents of the death
penalty a promising line of attack, and they are still furious about
it, comparing it to the court’s infamous 1857 decision that blacks
slaves were property and not citizens.

“McCleskey is the Dred Scott decision of our time,” Anthony G.
Amsterdam, a law professor at New York University, said in speech last
year at Columbia.

“It is a decision for which our children’s children will reproach our
generation and abhor the legal legacy we leave them,” said Professor
Amsterdam, who worked on the McCleskey case and many other capital
punishment landmarks.

The majority opinion in McCleskey was written by Justice Lewis F.
Powell Jr. After he retired, his biographer asked Justice Powell
whether, given the chance, he would change his vote in any case.
“Yes,” Justice Powell said. “McCleskey v. Kemp.”¦
--
Good luck to anyone trying to learn Aramaic.
I need a Toltec calendar with Hebrew glyphs.
Kind regards,
Peter


I just wrote a bunch about the statistical technique most likely used
here, logistic regression. I deleted my techno-babble. You're
welcome.

It isn't clear how phillips is determining his adjustment variables -
is the distinction between the values he gives to , say, robbery and
kidnapping, something he determined by examining cases: "in kidnapping
case in general, the death penalty was sought more than for robbery
cases"?

Is it in the statutes on the death penalty? For example does the
statute say something like:"aggravating factors include robbery,
severe aggravating factors include kidnapping and rape"?

Trying to evaluate a study like this through a news report is like
second guessing an investigation through news reports. You can get
some ideas, for sure. If the reporter has an attitude, or an editor
takes out a sentence or two, you are led in a false direction.

Bottom line items to take away are this:

First, If there is a tendency to to give blacks the death penalty more
than whites, it is somewhat attenuated by dual tendencies - first the
tendency to penalize perps more for having white victims and the
tendency for people to murder wtihin their own race.

Second, as Mr Snyder points out, the disparities in race are not huge
in the death penalty compared to those of gender (and yes, some of us
care) If the preacher had lost $17 K to Nigerian scammers and then
blew his wife away becaseu he was afraid of the criticism? He'd fry.
Doesn't matter how abusive she was.

I'm guessing that when it comes to something as serious as the DP,
even some sleazy or racist guys that are in prosecutors' offices or on
the bench would make a sincere effort to be fair, even when the same
guys might give a black dude 3 years for something they would give a
white dude one year for.

Like, the same guy that might say "He doesnt' deserve two years, but
hell, it's good for my politcal career, and you just KNOW that guy did
things we haven't caught him for," might say "Death? Um.... What if
there *IS* a heaven and a hell? I dunno if I want to do this."


Mick




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