The Color of Capital Punishment

Few issues in America illustrate the racial divide between whites and African Americans as capital punishment. An illustrative case is the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, one after which many African Americans cheered while a majority of whites shook their heads at what they viewed as an incredulous verdict of innocent. Capital punishment or the "death penalty," after a brief ban by Congress, was reintroduced in the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Furman v. Georgia (Stevenson 16). Since that time those who have been sentenced to the death penalty has risen to an all-time high (Minter 1). The increase in application of the death penalty makes the issue one of great controversy in American society. Adding to this controversy is the fact that a disproportional number of African Americans is on death row compared to their proportion in society. As Ross provides, "Despite the fact that African Americans comprise only about 12 percent of the national population, 40 percent or 1,117 of the prisoners under sentence of death in America are African American" (32). If capital punishment had a color in American society, the color would be Black. America's willingness to sanction homicide through capital punishment must end, primarily because it is applied in an arbitrary and prejudiced manner.

When the Supreme Court reauthorized the use of the death penalty in 1972, Chief Justice Warren Burger promoted the reintroduction of

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African Americans commit forty percent of the murders in this country" (2). Aside from this fact, those who support capital punishment as being impartial and just maintain that those who feel wrongly condemned to death row have numerous appeals in the legal system. They argue that these appeals can take a decade or longer to be exhausted, giving those condemned a significant chance to overturn their conviction due to trial error or innocence. Yet, despite this right for those condemned to death row, those who have been able to use those channels have not been able to prove they were innocent or treated in violation of their rights during trial. As Coker maintains, "For the most part, criminal defendants have been unsuccessful in challenging racially disproportionate surveillance, incarceration, or application of the death penalty" (827). Despite those who favor the death penalty as a fair and just punishment that is applied without prejudice or bias, new technologies have proven just how wrong the sentence of death can be. New technologies have freed a number of prisoners condemned to death row because of DNA evidence that indisputably demonstrates they are innocent of the crime for which they were sentenced. Such evidence

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