Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. 62]

April 22, 1987:

Court, 5-4, Rejects racial challenge to death penalty.
(headline front-page Times)

The Supreme Court, dashing the hopes of opponents of the death penalty, ruled 5 to 4 today that a state's capital punishment system was constitutional despite the fact that killers of white people are far more frequently sentenced to die than killers of blacks. The Court upheld Georgia's death penalty system against a challenge by a black man convicted of killing a white policeman in a 1978 robbery. The condemned man cited - and the Supreme Court majority assumed as valid - a study showing sharp racial disparities in the sentencing of killers in Georgia and showing in particular that capital punishment was far more likely in cases involving black killers of white victims. While 60 of Georgia homicide victims are black, out of seven people put to death in Georgia's electric chair since the 1976 decision by the Supreme Court upheld the state's death penalty law, six were black. The current black accused, Warren McClesky, shot a white policeman during a furniture store robbery. He was sentenced to death by a jury of eleven whites and one black.

Professor David C Baldus of the University of Iowa supplied a study showing that 11 percent of all those charged with killing white victims in Georgia and 22 percent of the blacks accused of killing whites were sentenced to death, as against 1 percent of those charged with killing blacks.^85.

Nation-wide, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Incorporated, 1487 inmates were on death row as of March 1. Of those 777 or 41.5 percent are black and 944 or 50.4 percent are white. Whites were the victims in about 75 percent of those cases, blacks in 13 per-

85. The New York Times, from a front-page report by Stuart Taylor Jr.

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cent. The rest were of other races, or their race is not known. New York State does not have a death penalty. Neighboring Connecticut does, but has not sentenced anyone under it. In New Jersey, which has the death penalty, there are 25 inmates on death row, 14 of whom are black, 11 white. The State of New Jersey kills by lethal injection.^86.

86. The New York Times, from a report by Lena Williams