The Bureau of Justice publishes these statistics with respect to the death penalty. What is interesting is that while they publish the statistics about the race of the condemned, they don’t tell you about the race of the victim. That is where the statistics are skewed. While it appears as if whites are condemned to death more often, statistically, blacks who kill whites are condemned at an astonishingly higher rate, and whites who kill blacks get away with their lives.
The execution of Wesley Baker last week lead to the author of what is called the Paternoster study (a study of how race and geography relate to death sentences in Maryland) to write an editorial in the Baltimore Sun today. Good stuff and I recommend everyone on both sides of the debate read it.
