The death penalty targets racial minorities

The argument

The argument presents two disparities and draws a conclusion about the system that produced them. The first concerns who is sentenced. According to the United States Census Bureau, 13% of the U.S. population is Black. However, Black Americans comprise 42% of the death row population, a startlingly disproportionate number compared to their presence in the population — a gap far too large to pass as statistical noise. The second concerns whose deaths are treated as warranting execution. The Death Penalty Information Center reports that in executions for murder, "75 percent of the cases involve the murder of white victims, even though blacks and whites are about equally likely to be victims of murder." That figure does different work from the first, because it holds the underlying crime constant. If the two groups are about equally likely to be murdered, a system applying one standard to every murder would produce roughly matching proportions of executions; the divergence therefore locates the disparity in how cases are handled rather than in which crimes are committed. Taken together, the argument holds, the criminal justice system is racially biased — more likely to condemn defendants of one race, and more likely to pursue death where the victim was of another. The final step concerns what follows for a punishment of this particular kind. A system that discriminates can correct itself over time in most of what it does: sentences are reviewed, convictions overturned, and those wrongly imprisoned released. Execution admits none of that. We cannot trust it to execute people fairly, without discriminating based on race, and where the error cannot afterwards be undone the appropriate response is to stop imposing the penalty rather than to wait for a fairer administration of it. For this reason, we should abolish the death penalty.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The death penalty's discriminatory use is horrible, but abolishing it is not a proper response to this injustice. This racial bias suggests that our system is broken, not the punishment itself. We must not abolish capital punishment, because it still serves as a fitting and retributive sentence for those who deserve it. Instead of abolishing the death penalty, we must reform the criminal justice system, ensuring that racial bias plays no role in deciding punishment.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The figures establish disparity but not where it enters. Death row composition reflects who is charged capitally, which varies by county prosecutor, by the offence charged and by the quality of the defence available — so the numbers alone do not isolate the sentence itself as the discriminating step. [Rejecting P2] Bias in application is an argument about administration. The same disparities appear at charging, bail, sentencing and parole, and nobody concludes from that that imprisonment as such should be abolished. [Rejecting P3] The premise assumes the fault cannot be corrected. If the objection is discrimination rather than the punishment, what follows is reform of charging and defence — not the removal of a sentence the opposing position holds to be deserved in some cases.