Race in Sentencing
In McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S.
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In McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) an African-American man was convicted of murdering a white police officer during an armed robbery in Georgia. The jury imposed the death penalty and he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in which he argued that Georgia's capital sentencing scheme was administered in a racially discriminatory manner in violation of his right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. To support his claim, he submitted a statistical study performed by professors David Baldus and others ("the Baldus study"). As the Supreme Court noted, the Baldus study indicated that black defendants in Georgia who killed white victims had the greatest likelihood of receiving the death penalty (McCleskey, 1987, p. 286). Nonetheless, the Court held that the study did not prove that the Georgia law was intentionally racially discriminatory or that racial discrimination had played a role in McCleskey's sentence. The Court's ruling, however, was wrong. The Baldus study proved that racial prejudices affected the sentences of black capital defendants in Georgia. As such, it was morally wrong for the Court to sanction a system in which racism played a part.The Baldus study examined more than 2,000 murder cases in Georgia during the 1970s and demonstrated several statistical conclusions. The Supreme Court noted that the study supported the conclusion that defendants charged with killing white persons received the death penalty more than t
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Approximate Word count = 1029
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page)
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In McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S.
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