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Sentencing Law and Policy
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New California study on race and death penalty

By Douglas Berman

Thanks to posts at TalkLeft and How Appealing, I saw news of a new study from California documenting the impact of race of the victim in the imposition of the death penalty.  The study, entitled “The Impact of Legally Inappropriate Factors on Death Sentencing for California Homicides, 1990-99,” can be accessed here and its major findings are summarized here.  A press release from the ACLU of Northern California (available here) sets out these key findings:

  • 80% of executions in California were for those convicted of killing whites, while only 27.6% of murder victims are white.
  • Those who murder whites are over four times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill Latinos and over three times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill African-Americans.
  • A person convicted of 1st degree murder in a predominantly white, rural county (like Napa, King, Colusa, or Shasta counties) is more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death than a person convicted of a similar crime in a diverse, urban county like Los Angeles, which has the highest number of homicides in the state.
  • The death rate by homicide in California varies substantially by race.  African-Americans are six times more likely to be murdered than whites.