Article

Whom the State Kills

By Harvard Law Review / Scott Phillips / Justin Marceau, on 1 January 2020



An unexpected feature of the modern death penalty is the fact that most persons sentenced to death are not executed […]. Death sentences are remarkably poor predictors of who will ultimately be executed. An even more salient feature of the death penalty is the fat that race matters […]. Rarity and race, then, stand as hallmarks of the American death penalty. But until now the interaction of these two phenomena has not been studied. This Article examines whether race is relevant for understanding the fate of the unfortunate few […]. By combining Baldus’s sentencing data whith original execution data, we demonstrate that the overall execution is susbsentially greater for defendants convicted of killing a white victim than for those convicted of killing a Black victim.

  • Document type Article
  • Countries list United States
  • Themes list Discrimination,



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