RALEIGH – Opponents of North Carolina’s death penalty have seized on a new racial-disparity study as supporting their case. They obviously haven’t thought through its implications – it makes the case for capital punishment, not against it.
In the past, clumsy, uninformed foes of the death penalty have claimed that its application is biased against minority defendants. This isn’t true today, and hasn’t been true in decades, as more-astute activists on the Left have long understood.
The latter make a different claim, with some justification in the data: that in North Carolina and most other states with capital punishment, the murderers of white victims are more likely to be executed than murderers of non-white victims are.
The race of the killer is, in other words, not the explanatory variable. It’s the race of the victim that seems to affect the outcome, all other things being held as equally as possible.
The latest research on the issue, by professors from the University of Colorado and Northeastern University, found that murderers of white victims in North Carolina are nearly three times as likely to get the death penalty as murderers of other black victims. The Raleigh News & Observer quoted North Carolina activists responding to the study:
Jay Ferguson, a defense lawyer in Durham, said the study found what others have shown – that it’s not so much the race of the defendant, but the race of the victim, that determines the punishment.
“I think, over the years, the white-victim cases seem to get more attention in the criminal justice system,” Ferguson said. “They seem to get more attention from the district attorneys and the juries. The legislature has made it clear that if we’re going to have a death penalty in North Carolina, it’s got to be colorblind. And these studies show it’s not.”
Ferguson and other death-penalty foes seem not to grasp of the import of their own words. The white-victim cases “seem to get more attention in the criminal justice system,” he said. For the sake of argument, assume that his explanation for the study’s racial-disparity finding is the correct one. It certainly doesn’t sound like the usual rap against North Carolina’s death penalty: that insufficient attention is paid to its prosecution and administration.
Think about it. Ferguson’s explanation assumes that prosecutors are more likely to go after the killers of white victims, devoting attention and resources to securing a capital conviction, because the public puts a higher value on those victims. The explanation assumes that juries are more likely to value white victims enough to deliver the ultimate punishment to their killers. It also assumes that judges will, on balance, rule against defendants on procedural questions when the victims are white.
That is, the explanation assumes that the more the individuals who make up the criminal-justice system display an affinity for the victim and demand justice, the more they will employ the death penalty to achieve it.
If you want to know why most North Carolinians still support capital punishment as a just and necessary punishment for the most egregious crimes in the state, despite years of attempts by opponents to abolish it, you don’t need to invent some elaborate socio-political model or conspiracy theory. You just need to recognize the unstated but inescapable assumption here that the death penalty is a natural, predictable reflection of compassion for the victims and righteous anger against their killers. It is not a reflection of animus against minorities accused of crime, as is so often alleged without statistical proof.
What we need, then, is to ensure that North Carolina’s criminal-justice system truly reflects the value we claim to share: that all victims are equally deserving of compassion and of justice. It shouldn’t matter if the victim is white or black, male or female, rich or poor, a celebrity or a face in the crowd. The justice system should render like outcomes in like cases. Those who commit horrendous murders should pay the appropriate price.
In other words, North Carolina does not execute enough murderers of non-white victims. Let’s correct that defect as soon as possible.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.