Apartheid. USA 1988

March 19, 1987:

On the evening of May 13, 1978, four men entered the Dixie Furniture Store in Atlanta, Georgia, secured the showroom by forcing everyone to lie face down on the floor and as they searched for cash, one of them shot and killed a police officer. Three of the men were sentenced to varying prison terms for the crime, while another, Warren McClesky, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Like most of those now on Georgia's death row, Mr McClesky is black, and his victim was white. His case is extraordinary only in that his appeal is the first to be heard by the United States Supreme Court based on the contention that Georgia's death-sentencing process is unconstitutionally infected by racial discrimination. Mr McClesky's sentence, handed down by a jury of 11 whites and one black, is viewed by opponents of the death penalty as perhaps the last broad-based challenge to the way the death penalty is imposed in most states and the last opportunity to save many of the 1.874 convicts now on death row. ‘Race is the pre-eminent factor in deciding who lives and who dies in capital punishment cases, particularly here in the death belt (Southern) States,’ said Steven B Bright, an attorney with the South-

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ern Prisoners Defense Committee, which represents indigent capital defendants. ‘When you kill the organist at the Methodist Church who is white, you are going to get the death penalty. But if you kill the black Baptist organist, the likelihood is that it will be pleabargained down to a life sentence,’ Mr Bright added.

Since the Supreme Court first upheld some revised death penalty laws in 1976 after striking down all existing death penalty laws four years earlier, there have been 70 executions; 1 in 1977, 2 in 1979, 1 in 1981, 2 in 1982, 5 in 1983, 21 in 1984, 18 in 1986 and 2 so far this year. Forty two of those executed, or 60 percent were black; 26 were white and 2 were Hispanic. David Baldus, a law professor at the University of Iowa, studied the 2 484 homicides that occurred in Georgia from 1973 to 1979. In those cases 1 665 defendants were black and 819 were white. Blacks were the victims of homicides in about 61 percent of the cases, whites in 39 percent. The Baldus study did not find that black defendants overall were more likely to get the death sentence than white defendants. But Professor Baldus did find that of the 2 484 murders in Georgia, blacks who had killed whites were sentenced to death at three times the rate of whites who killed blacks.^70.

70. The New York Times, from a report by Kenneth B Noble