Death penalty states in the U.S. “are in the midst of an historic run of executions that exhibit an unprecedented white-victim preference, and the primacy given white-victim cases masks a significant underlying bias against Black defendants,” a comprehensive analysis by Death Penalty Policy Project Director Robert Dunham released earlier this month shows.
In his DP3 Substack blog, Dunham writes that Tennessee’s recent execution of Oscar Smith on May 22 exemplifies how states “wield the death penalty as an implement of power to reinforce the racial hierarchy in the U.S. social order,” despite the fact Smith and the three victims he was convicted and sentenced to death for killing — his estranged wife and her two sons — were white.
The statistics are undeniable, as Dunham notes. Smith was the 1,626th person executed in the U.S. since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia, ending a four-year pause that began when the Court found in Furman v. Georgia that its death penalty statute was discriminatory. In the last 49 years, according to Dunham, there have been 1,236 executions, and in 76% of them, every victim was white. “That percentage is remarkable, given that whites comprise barely half of all homicide victims in the country,” he states.
And Dunham maintains that “as the nationwide attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion has intensified, the white-victim disproportionality in executions has gotten worse.”
Among his findings:
- Thirty-eight of the 44 executions since January 1, 2024 (86.4%) have involved at least one white victim, and 37 (84.1%) have involved only white victims.
- Twenty-four of the last 25 executions during the current execution surge in the U.S. (96.0%) have been in cases with only white victims. The last 18 of those executions, the four scheduled this week, and the other executions currently scheduled before the end of June, also involve only white victims.
- “If those six pending executions are carried out, ten different states will have combined to conduct an unprecedented 24 consecutive executions of defendants convicted of killing only white victims, the longest spree of executions involving just one race of victims in the modern history of the U.S. death penalty,” Dunham states.
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