Don't kill a white person!

The stats prove that it's much safer to kill a Black.

In 1752, Pierre Antoine Dochenet, a white man, stabbed two Black women. He was sentenced to death and executed.

And yet, in Louisiana, no white person has ever been executed for killing a Black.

How can both these things be true?

The apparent contradiction is explained by the real nature of Dochenet’s crime. It was not that he stabbed two Black women—both of whom survived the attack; it was that the women were slaves, and that the true victims of the crime, in the eyes of the law, were the white slaveowners.

Diving into the stats

This Black History Month, I’ve been digging into the stats on executions, both nationally and in Sister Helen Prejean’s home state of Louisiana.

Since records began in 1608, the US has seen 16,156 people executed.*

In that same time, Louisiana has executed 661 people, 459 of whom were Black.

The country took a brief respite from killing its own people following the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972) which deemed executions unconstitutional because of their arbitrary and discriminatory application. Note that at no time did the Court deem executions unconstitutional per se.

After Furman, Southern states quickly regrouped by drafting new regulations, and in 1976 Georgia persuaded the Court (Gregg v. Georgia) that the state’s revised procedures eliminated the capriciousness that had disturbed the bench four years previously.

Since that Gregg decision, a further 1,657 people have been executed.

How race plays out

The early execution stats, from 1608 until the Furman decision, don’t record the race of the victim, but it is this statistic that puts the racism of the death penalty in full focus. Since Gregg, in 78% of the executions the victim was white.

The simple fact is, if you kill a white person you are far more likely to be executed than if your victim is Black.

This is a reflection of a system where institutions were riddled with racism from the start, with policing, charging, jury selection, and sentencing all skewing your chances, and it is prosecutors who decide who gets life and who faces death. All the statistics show that they are far more likely to go for death when the victim is white.

Even the Supreme Court recognized this fatal flaw in the application of the death penalty, but chose to disregard it in one of the Court’s most egregious decisions—and, oh my!, has the Court made some whoppers!—McCleskey v. Kemp (1987).

This year, Black History Month celebrates its centenary. It started out in 1926 as Negro History Week, morphed into Black History Month in 1976. One wonders when we will ever evolve into annually celebrating Black History Year.

The Atlantic has an excellent article on Black History Month (free link.)

* I’ve used the Execution Database from Death Penalty Info for statistics since 1976 and the ESPY database for stats from 1608 until 1972. The earlier stats are not necessarily complete.

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Mardi Gras for the Mind

Put these dates in your diary: Thursday, March 12th - Saturday, March 14th.

That’s when the New Orleans Book Festival takes place on the campus of Tulane University. The festival is entirely free and open to the public. Last year it attracted 18,000 visitors.

This year, Sister Helen Prejean and I will be speaking on Saturday, March 14th at 1pm. Moderating our talk will be Sophie Cull, the co-author with Calvin Duncan of The Jailhouse Lawyer.

Sophie and Calvin will also be on a panel during the festival, plus some other notables: Salman Rushdie, Stacey Abrams, Ken Burns, Deepak Chopra, Roxanne Gay, Walter Isaacson. Here’s the complete lineup.