Erasing Race: The Avoidance of Racial Inequality in Capital Sentencing Trials

• In Event: Capital Punishment: Sentencing Issues and Controversies

Abstract

Race remains one of the most prominent issues when it comes to the death penalty in America. In addition to the evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty, due to the structural realities of America, non-white capital defendants experience mitigating circumstances related to their race that white defendants do not. However, the color-blind ideology of post-Civil Rights America suggests that capital litigators would avoid discussing issues of race and racial inequality. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis of the population of available capital penalty trial transcripts over an eleven-year period in New Castle County, Delaware, this study explores whether capital defense attorneys do, in fact, address racial inequality in their mitigation cases or whether they discuss inequality and disadvantage in a purely color-blind fashion. The findings reveal that defense attorneys never broached the topic of racial inequality, but that they were willing to talk about other forms of inequality, such as economic deprivation and violent communities. These findings suggest that color-blind ideology does infect capital mitigation, a reality that places non-white defendants at a further disadvantage in capital penalty proceedings.

Author

• Ross Kleinstuber, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown