SOUTH CAROLINA — The Death Penalty Information Center has released a new report examining the death penalty in South Carolina and the role race has played in the administration of capital punishment throughout the state’s history. According to DPIC, the state-sanctioned violence has “disproportionately affected Black communities for more than 150 years.”
According to DPIC, these acts of “racial terror” are not separate from the formal punishment practices historically carried out in the central and western regions of South Carolina. DPIC reports that Lexington County and Greenville County, two counties within the state, account for “13 documented racial terror lynchings” and “have also imposed 28 death sentences on Black defendants since 1975.”
DPIC reports that South Carolina has disproportionately sentenced Black youth to death row. The report states that “every juvenile executed between 1865 and 1972 was Black.” Five people in South Carolina were executed for committing crimes before they turned 21, and DPI reports that four of those individuals were Black.
Marion Bowman, Jr., is the fifth person under 21 to be sentenced to death in South Carolina since Roper v. Simmons, the United States Supreme Court decision that prohibits the death penalty for criminal defendants under 18, was decided in 2005, according to DPI.
DPIC reports that these patterns reflect “broader national patterns of prosecutorial and juror misconduct.” According to DPIC, the report “highlights cases of Black capital defendants who have endured the use of racial epithets in courtrooms.”
The report further documents the “systematic exclusion of Black jurors,” which has led to capital punishment sentences being imposed by “all-white juries.” DPIC states that research into jury selection practices revealed “significant racial disparities in capital jury selection across the state.”
DPIC reports that research conducted by Ann M. Eisenberg, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law, “found that between 1997 and 2012, Black prospective jurors were excluded for cause at a rate of 56%; a substantially higher rate than that for white prospective jurors.”
The center also referenced an interview conducted with The Marshall Project and Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson discussed how the “history of slavery, lynchings, and racial terror in the South played in the racially-motivated killings of nine black people in an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015.”
Quoting Stevenson further, DPIC shared what he said he would do as governor of South Carolina. Stevenson stated, “We’re going to abolish the death penalty, because we have a history of lynching and terror that has demonized and burdened people of color in this state since we’ve became a state.”
In its final statement, DPIC reported on Justice 360, a South Carolina-based organization that is “working to reform policies and practices in capital and juvenile life without parole proceedings,” and which has developed “a proposal for a remedy in response to the historical racial violence in the state.”
The proposed policy, known as the South Carolina Racial Justice Act, would be “a modest but important step toward remedying [racial discrimination] issues revealed by empirical data,” according to DPIC.
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Based upon this article, none of the post 1973 data supports any claim of racism.
There is this
“Black prospective jurors were excluded for cause at a rate of 56%; a substantially higher rate than that for white prospective jurors.”
Polling shows that Blacks oppose the death penalty at higher rates than whites, so no surprise.
You didn’t tell us who made the “racial epithets in courtrooms.” and what resulted from such language.
As I am sure DPIC failed to tell us, there own review of polling in South Carolina shows about 65% of blacks oppose the death penalty, inclusive of Roof’s slaughter of 9 black church goers, with 65% of whites supporting death penalty, making the 56% blacks excluded for cause, seemingly, low.