Apartheid. USA 1988

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April 24, 1987:

The New York Times publishes another editorial attack on the prevailing color bar in the United States:

Discrimination in death? Yes, 5-4.

How does the Supreme Court respond to evidence that American justice values the life of a white murder victim more highly than a black victim? It doesn't make any difference.

The Court admitted as much in a decision that assumes the accuracy of data showing that Georgia hands down the death sentence at least four times as often when the victim is white. Challenged to decide whether any defendant, black or white, should be executed under such a system, a 5 to 4 majority delivered a shocking response: So discriminatory a result is not necessarily racist, and therefore it is perfectly constitutional ... According to the Supreme Court, they must prove that race is the reason that the prosecution asked for death or that the jury decreed it or that the judiciary upheld it. When Georgia's legal system was all-white by law, that might have been easy to prove. But to require such a proof now is to require the impossible. Capital punishment procedures in Georgia, and many states, have long been tainted by racism... Using Georgia's own criminal files, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund found first that the capital sentencing rate for white victim cases was 11 times that for black victims. Even allowing for 230 other variances, the death sentence was four times more likely to be imposed when the victim was white.

Justice William Brennan, in a dissent to the Court's decision wrote with eloquence and relevance of America's efforts to purge a racist past:

‘We cannot pretend that in three decades we have completely escaped the grip of a historical legacy spanning centuries. Warren McClesky's evidence confronts us with the subtle and persistent influence of the past. His message is a disturbing one to a society that has formally repudiated

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racism... Nonetheless, we ignore him at our peril, for we remain imprisoned by the past as long as we deny its influence in the present.’ Death is different, concluded the Times, ‘and given the chances of grisly error, wrong. But even people who favor capital punishment should cringe as long as death means discrimination.’^88.

88. The New York Times, April 24, 1987