Diversity

Running head : Racial Disparity in the Application of the Death Penalty

Racial Disparity in the Application of the Death Penalty

Name

College

Racial Disparity in the Application of the Death Penalty

Introduction

Since the days of slavery in which minorities were considered possessions , through the periods of Jim Crow rules and lynching , the death penalty has always been plagued by race . Regrettably , the days of racial disparity in the application of capital punishment are not a vestige of the past . Presently , there exists a great disparity in the implementation

of federal capital punishment . Racial minorities are being charged under federal capital punishment far beyond their percentage in the overall population or the populace of criminal offenders . Evaluation of prosecutions under the death penalty or capital punishment of the Anti-drug Abuse Act indicates that eighty nine percent of the selected defendants for death penalty have either been Mexican-American or African-American (Death Penalty Information Center 2009 . In addition , the figure of prosecutions under the other acts has been on the increase in the previous years with no visible decline in the ethnic disparities . Almost all of the recently accepted federal death penalties have been against black defendants . This sequence of inequality further adds to the proof that ethnicity continues to play an intolerable part in the application of death penalty in America Additionally , it confirms the conclusion that the capital punishment experiment has Background on Death Penalty and Race

Throughout United States ' history , capital punishment has declined unreasonably on racial...