“Of course, the death penalty is racist. And it would be wrong even if it weren’t,” the Los Angeles Times stated in an editorial earlier this month. The piece is in response to two significant developments that occurred last month, highlighting the racism inherent in capital punishment. The first was a writ petition filed by the Office of the State Public Defender, legal organizations, and civil rights groups at the CA Supreme Court contending that the death penalty “is administered in a racially discriminatory manner and violates the equal protection provisions of the state Constitution.” The second was an order issued by a federal district court judge to the Alameda District Attorney to review as many as 35 death penalty cases in California’s Alameda County from the past 30 years to look for “any potential signs of prosecutorial misconduct in the form of the exclusion of jurors based solely on race.” However, the editors write, “Even if the state could perform painless and anxiety-free executions and racial biases were eliminated, the death penalty would still be wrong” because, among other factors, it gives the government too much power, is applied arbitrarily, and “is overtly political.”
For 45 years, the Rev. Joseph B. Ingle served as a spiritual advisor to the condemned, counseling them, praying with them, and bearing witness to their executions by the state. His book, Too Close to the Flame, is an account of those years and the terrible emotional and psychological toll of being “inside the Southern killing machine.” Vatican News spoke with Ingle about his years ministering to those on death row and his work with one man in particular, Robert Sullivan. Sullivan had been on Florida’s death row for the 1973 murder of Donald Schmidt, a Howard Johnson’s manager; at the time of his execution in 1983, Sullivan had been on death row longer than any other person in the country. Sullivan had many prominent supporters, but arguably his most high-profile was Pope John Paul II, who personally pleaded with officials to grant Sullivan clemency. But even his plea was to no avail, and the 36-year-old Sullivan was electrocuted by the state in November 1983.
“Four experiences are nearly ubiquitous in the lives of women on death row: motherhood, exposure to gender-based violence, disability, and a lack of prior convictions for acts of violence,” Sandra Babcock, Nathalie Greenfield, and Kathryn Adamson write in their article “Gender Matters: Women on Death row in the United States.” The authors studied the cases of 48 individuals sentenced to death between 1990 – 2023 who identified as women at the time of their trials. Their findings include “the extent to which capital prosecutions are dominated by men—including judges, elected District Attorneys, defense attorneys, and juror forepersons—and explain why gender matters in determining who lives and who dies,” and explain the need for “more nuanced research that embraces the complexities in women’s capital cases and accounts for the presence of systemic and intersectional discrimination.”
In its piece, “I Just Wanted…to Stay Alive”: Who was William Henry Furman, the Prisoner at the Center of a Historic Legal Decision?” the Death Penalty Information Center examines the case of the man behind Furman v. Georgia (1972), “one of the most monumental cases in American legal history.” The U.S. Supreme Court decision “overturned every state death penalty statute” in the U.S. and saved the lives of 588 people on death row, DPIC notes, but Furman, the lead petitioner, “poor, Black, mentally ill, and physically and intellectually disabled,” was barely “aware of his impact.” Furman, who was sentenced to death for a killing committed during a botched robbery, was found by a panel of doctors before his trial to have mental challenges but was nevertheless found competent to stand trial. A jury of 11 white and one Black individual found him guilty and sentenced him to death. He was released on parole in 1984.
