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PHILADELPHIA: Is Justice Blind?

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PHILADELPHIA: Is Justice Blind?

America is known as the country of equality. However, can a country really call itself equal if the justice system is not blind? In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is constitutional. Even though capital punishment is considered constitutional and has led to 500 executions of convicted murderers, there is an ongoing debate about the fairness of this ruling. This debate involves an issue deeply ingrained in America’s history: race.
In order to determine whether or not there is an association between race and death sentences in the U.S., the Death Penalty Information Center conducted a study. Researchers followed 667 murder convictions in Philadelphia courts between 1983 and 1993 and published their results in the 1998 study The Death Penalty in Black and …show more content…
Here, we see that overall black defendants received the death penalty more often than white defendants. Even though the total percentage of death sentences was almost equal for murdering black and white victims, 17.2% (77 of 447) and 17.3% (38 of 220), respectively, we must examine the conditional distribution to see the breakdown of the race of the defendants. For a white victim, black defendants were sentenced to death in 21.2% (21 of 99) of convictions while white defendants were sentenced in 14% (17 of 121) of such convictions. Perhaps most striking of all is the small percentage of white defendants sentenced when accused of murdering a black. For a black victim, black defendants were sentenced to death in 18% (76 of 422) of convictions while white defendants were sentenced in only 4% (1 of 25) of such convictions. (see graph on the next page for a visual representation of death sentences depending on the race of both the defendant and the

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