In the context of the McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) case, discuss whether the death penalty discriminates against persons who murdered Whites.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may vary.The question that the McCleskey v. Kemp case considered was whether the death penalty discriminated against persons who murdered Whites.Warren McCleskey, a Black man, was convicted in 1978 of armed robbery and the murder of a White police officer who had responded to an alarm while the robbery was in progress. McCleskey was sentenced to die in Georgia's electric chair. He challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty on the ground that it was administered in a racially discriminatory manner in Georgia. In the words of one of his attorneys, "When you kill the organist at the Methodist Church, who is White, you're going to get the death penalty, but if you kill the Black Baptist organist, the likelihood is that it will be plea bargained down to a life sentence."The foundation for McCleskey's appeal was a comprehensive study of race and capital sentencing in the state of Georgia conducted by David Baldus, a law professor at the University of Iowa, and his colleagues. They analyzed the race of the offender and the race of the victim for about 2,000 murder and manslaughter convictions from 1973 to 1979 and concluded that those who killed Whites were 11 times more likely to receive the death penalty than those who killed Blacks. Anticipating the argument that the heinousness of the murders may explain this finding, Baldus and his colleagues eliminated cases in which extreme violence or other aggravating circumstances virtually ensured the death penalty and cases in which overwhelming mitigating circumstances almost guaranteed a life sentence. For the remaining cases-which permitted the greatest jury discretion-they found that defendants were about four times more likely to be sentenced to death if their victims were White.Despite the mass of statistical evidence, the Supreme Court upheld McCleskey's death sentence. Because there was no evidence that individual jurors in his trial were biased, the Court was unwilling to assume that McCleskey's jury valued a White life more than a Black life.