cutors have submitted for capital punishment trials since 1976, eighty percent had minority defendants. Today, 16 of the 20 people on federal death row are minorities...this is proof that prosecutors discriminate by race, consciously or not” (2).
The death penalty is discriminatory, given that it appears to be more often than not employed with respect to members of racial, ethnic and other minority groups and males more than either women or whites. Given the lack of any kind of national standards for applying the death penalty across all states, the application of the death penalty basically involves an unavoidable arbitrariness in its application. Crimes for which an individual might almost automatically receive the death penalty in one state are treated less harshly in others. So, too, it appears individuals who murder whites are more likely to receive the death penalty than individuals who murder non-whites. Mike Mears is the head of the multicounty public defenders’ office in Georgia, responsible for monitoring all death penalty cases in the state. Mears feels that racial discrimination occurs because of the arbitrary means of seeking or imposing the death penalty, “It’s the capriciousness of who is selected for the death penalty and who is not” (A7).
The research demonstrates that a death sentence is much more l
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