Homicides involving white victims are seven times more likely to result in an execution than those involving black victims, according to a recent study on the racial disparities of executions in Missouri.
And homicides involving white female victims are nearly 14 times more likely to result in an execution than those involving black male victims.
“These disparities are so great that they call in to question the equity of the application of the harshest penalty, adding to growing concerns that the death penalty is applied in an unfair, capricious, and arbitrary manner,” stated Frank R. Baumgartner, a political science professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Baumgartner’s study, released on July 16, is titled “The impact of race, gender and geography on Missouri executions.”
Between 1976 and 2014, the study found that the state of Missouri executed 80 men. Eighty-one percent of these men were executed for the murder of white victims.
“This is striking given that 60 percent of all homicide victims in Missouri are black,” he wrote.
White women represent just 12 percent of all homicide victims, but constitute 37 percent of the victims in execution cases, according to the study. Black men, by contrast, represent 52 percent of all homicide victims, but just 12 percent of the individuals who were executed were convicted of killing black men.
Nationally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that from 1980 through 2008, white perpetrators killed 84 percent of white victims of homicide, and 93 percent of black victims were killed by black perpetrators. Further, this tendency for crimes to be within racial group remains true even among “stranger homicides” – where the victim does not know the offender, Baumgartner found. Black-on-black crimes are extremely unlikely to be punished with the death penalty, however.
“The importance of the victims’ race in the application of the death penalty has created a system where whites are likely to face the death penalty only for within-race crimes, and blacks for cross-race crimes,” he wrote. “In other words, the race and gender of the victim is a key determining factor in deciding who faces execution in Missouri.”
Geography also plays an important role.
Here are a few other key findings of his research:
● A person convicted of homicide in St. Louis County is three times more likely to be executed than if they were convicted of the same crime in the vast majority of other counties in the state, and 13 times more likely to be executed than if they are convicted of the same crime in the city of St. Louis.
● Homicides committed in Callaway, Schuyler, and Moniteau counties are 30 to 70 times more likely to result in an execution than homicides committed in the vast majority of state’s counties.
● A majority of the state’s 80 executions that occurred between 1976 and 2014 come from just three, or 2.6%, of the state’s 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis.
● Eighty-one percent of the individuals executed in Missouri were convicted of killing White victims even though White victims are less than 40% of all murder victims in the state.
● Even though the vast majority of murders involve an offender and victim(s) of the same race, 54% of the African-American men executed by Missouri were convicted of crimes involving White victims.
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