In their essay “Sacred Victims: Fifty Years of Data on Victim Race and Sex as Predictors of Execution,” in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Scott Phillips, Justin F. Marceau, Sam Kamin, and Nicole King “update and expand” a well-known study by David Baldus of homicides in Georgia in the 1970s, which looked at the race and sex of victims and whether those factors determined whether a defendant was sentenced to death. Not surprisingly, the authors found that “the odds of a death sentence were 16 times greater if the victim was a White woman than if the victim was a Black man, even when other factors that might explain the disparity were taken into account.” In addition, the authors found “a clear hierarchy among victims with regard to whether a death sentence was ultimately carried out.” Thirty percent of death-sentenced individuals who were convicted of killing a White woman were executed, but if the victim was a White man, the number dropped to 19%. If the victim was a Black woman, 10 percent of those convicted were executed, and if the victim was a Black man, no one was executed. They then used current homicide data to conclude that “these disparities, which cannot be explained by factors extrinsic to the victim’s race and sex, are further evidence that the ultimate question of who lives and dies in our criminal justice system remains unconstitutionally tainted by outdated notions of chivalry and White supremacy.”
In his poem, “82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984,” in the New York Review of Books, Joe Kloc makes a powerful argument against the death penalty by simply combining sentences from 52 of the last words spoken by people in the execution chamber, just before the state killed, them into a poem. The impact is devastating from the first words, “Um, I don’t know what to say. I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be, but I guess it only hurts for a little while,” to the last, “Let me know that I will be in Heaven tonight, please let me know, I don’t want to be in Hell with Satan or anyone else, please, that is something I need to know.”
California artist Amy Elkins also incorporated the last words spoken by people about to be executed in her visual archive, “Parting Words.” Elkins combed through some 560 mug shots and records of the last statements of the people executed in Texas since 1976, converting “each mug shot into looping excerpts … ranging from confessions to hymns, protest to sorrows and fears.” It’s a compelling—and haunting—work of art.
