The Flaw in the California Death Penalty StudyInterestingly,
they focus on the race/ethnicity of the victim:
California murder convicts are much more likely to receive death sentences if their victim is white rather than black or Latino, according to a study released Wednesday.
The study, conducted by Glenn Pierce of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and Michael Radelet, sociology professor at the University of Colorado, found that people who kill whites are four times more likely to be sentenced to die than those who kill Latinos and three times more likely to get death sentences than those who kill African Americans.and
Eighty percent of the executions carried out in California from 1990 to 1999 were for the murders of white people, although whites made up 28 percent of the homicide victims in California during that decade.and
African Americans were six times more likely to be homicide victims than whites.
"This study raises significant questions about whether the death penalty is administered fairly in this state," Donald Polden, dean of the Santa Clara University School of Law, said in a letter to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice.Notice anything odd? Yep, there is no discussion of the race of the murderer. Now, if black murderers were being executed at a higher rate than white murderers, don't you think that would be mentioned quite prominently?
In fact, they are not.
The study (PDF file) notes that 11 men have been executed in California since 1992. Eight were white, one was black, one was Asian, and one was Native American.
It is a quirk of murder statistics more than anything else that is going on. One of the oddities that anybody looking at murder stats will notice pretty quickly is that the race of the murderer is strongly correlated to the race of the victim. That is to say, there are fewer cross-racial murders than might be expected.
Proof? Here's the
FBI report (Excel file) comparing murder victims by race to their offenders by race for the year 2003 (last year for which complete data is available).
....................................Race of offender
Race of victim.....Total......White...Black...Other...Unk
White................3,603......3,017.....501......44......41
Black.................3,147.........226..2,864........8......49
Other...................199...........47.......26....122........4
Unknown...............75...........33.......21........2......19
Whites are far more likely to kill whites than they are blacks, and blacks are far more likely to kill blacks than they are whites. The problem is that statistical fact means that one can draw racist implications in the application of the death penalty no matter what the government does.
For example, suppose the government decides that, say, 25% of all murders are deserving of the death penalty, and that it then ensures that this is carried out so that white victims and black victims are evenly likely to see their killers get the death penalty. Then blacks will be "disproportionately represented" on death row. The calculation is a little trickier than it might seem, because there is not a 1-1 relationship between murderers and their victims; some murderers kill more than one victim, and some victims are murdered by more than one person. But let's ignore that for now and assume that while the numbers may be slightly off, the proportions will be reasonably similar.
Then the government will execute 831 whites, and 853 blacks and 44 "others" (those of unknown race are clearly the ones who got away). Blacks, who are about 13% of the population will represent almost 50% of the death row inmates. It must be a racist system!
So we turn things around, and decide that no matter what, we have to make sure that blacks make up no more than 13% of those executed, and that they are equally likely to be executed for murdering whites as for murdering blacks. We'll stick with the 25% figure for white and other murderers to be executed, so that there are still 831 whites and 44 others on death row. Then in order for them not to be overrepresented on death row, there would be 291 condemned blacks.
If we apportion that back to the race of the victim, we'd have the killers of 808 white victims (or 22.4% of those victims) and 303 black victims (or 9.6% of those victims) facing the ultimate penalty. This means that the killer of a white person is about 2.3 times as likely to get the death penalty as the killer of a black person.
Get it? No matter what the government does on capital punishment, it will be considered racist. If it tries to limit the number of blacks executed, it will inevitably end up executing a smaller percentage of those who kill blacks than those who kill whites. If it executes those who kill blacks as often as it does those who kill whites, it will inevitably execute more blacks than their percentage of the general population (although not of the population of murderers).
The real issue, of course, is that blacks are far more likely to commit murders, about 7 times more likely according to the FBI. Blacks make up about 13% of the population, while whites (a grouping that includes Hispanics in the FBI's numbers) make up about 81% of the population. Hence there are about 7 times as many whites as blacks but the number of white murderers and black murderers were roughly equal in 2003. If we were to divide the number of murders by blacks by 7, it would become a fairly simple task to ensure that whites and blacks were proportionately represented on death row and that black victims and white victims were equally likely to see their killer face the death penalty. But until that happens chasing either of these goals will inevitably lead to squawks that the other proportion is unfair.
Notes:
1. California's statistics cited in the newspaper article and the US statistics from the FBI are not directly comparable because in this case the study distinguishes between whites and Hispanics. Oddly, however, it lumps the huge Hispanic population (about 25% of the state) in a grouping entitled "Asians and Other" that accounts for about 33.8% of the population. Big red flag that they're hiding something here (probably that the murder rate among Hispanics is high).
