Who Says The Death Penalty Is Racist?

Twenty-seven of America’s fifty states have the death penalty, and three of those – California, Oregon and Pennsylvania – currently have a moratorium on it. That being said, only a handful of states apply it with any enthusiasm, most notably Texas.  Surprisingly, only seventeen people were executed last year, all of them men, including one federal execution.

This year only twelve people have been executed – the federal execution of one woman and eleven men by the states; David Cox on November 17,  his was the first execution by Mississippi since 2012. The last execution was of the seventy-nine year old Bigler Stouffer by Oklahoma for the 1985 murder of a former girlfriend and the attempted murder of her husband.

With so few executions, it is surprising is it not that this is such a contentious issue in the United States? True, many more people are sentenced to death, but most languish on death row for decades before dying of natural causes. Yet we are told loudly and often that capital punishment is so odious because of racism; it executes a “disproportionate number” of “people of color” – that horrible phrase again, as though the world were made up of whites and everyone else. Ask Xi Jinping what he thinks of that. The other claim, one often made by Clive Stafford Smith is that capital punishment is so unfair because it is the people without the capital who get the punishment, apart from his wealthy chum and double killer Krishna Maharaj.

Of those executed in 2020-21, fifteen were white, eleven were black, one Hispanic, and one Native American. If a “disproportionate number” of black men were executed, why no black women? Why not Linda Carty who has been on death row in Texas since 2002? Indeed, why only one woman? Why only one Hispanic when they have a larger population than blacks?

Many of those executed were convicted of truly heinous crimes. Lisa Montgomery carried out a foetal abduction; Lezmond Mitchell who became the first member of the Navajo Nation to be executed by the Federal Government in the modern era, murdered a woman and her nine year old granddaughter. The black Cory Johnson was a gangster who along with his partners-in-crime murdered seven people.

Are we supposed to believe the world would be a better place if they had not been executed? In the United States, calls to abolish capital punishment come overwhelmingly from white liberals and blacks of a certain type – idiots like the academic Marc Lamont Hill. In August, Hill had an insane debate with a member of the Nation Of Islam. He argued that mass murderer Dylann Roof should be spared execution because if people like him are executed, the death penalty will more often be used against “black and brown people”. And?  Obviously, Rizza Islam wasn’t impressed with this nonsense.

Some of these people, including BNC News and the Innocence Project – have gone so far as to  present fabricated testimony to the American public in their attempts to save obviously guilty men from execution – successfully in the case of Julius Jones, and perhaps even in the case of murderer and serial rapist Rodney Reed.

If you want to see how most ordinary blacks feel about capital punishment – the way most ordinary people worldwide feel about it – check out this documentary which was uploaded to YouTube on October 1. Capital punishment was abolished in South Africa on June 6, 1995, but many people wish it hadn’t been, none more so than the friends and relatives of the victims of Jimmy Maketta, a serial killer who preyed on poor people in a rural area. Maketta murdered men as well as raping and murdering women.

He was arrested December 30, 2005, and pleaded guilty in May 2007. Look at the reactions of especially the women demanding the restoration of the death penalty. This page from the website of the Death Penalty Information Center contains information about executions worldwide. The United States lags way behind the top four, and curiously, in none of these other countries is race considered to be an issue.

Leaving that aside, if the death penalty were to be reserved for the worst of the worst, in particular spree killers, serial killers, and those convicted of particularly heinous crimes on overwhelming evidence, there would be no reasonable argument against it.