A Death Penalty Wake-up Call: Reducing the Risk of Racial Discrimination in Capital Punishment

In Ernest Gaines's novel A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines tells the story of Jefferson, a young African-American man convicted of murdering a white grocery store owner in a small Louisiana town in the late 1940s. 1 The public defender, trying to arouse sympathy for the defendant, refers to Jefferson as a dumb animal-a "hog." 2 The lawyer implores the jurors to "look at the shape of this skull, this face as flat as the palm of my hand."3 Surely this "thing," his argument continues, could not plan a murder.4 In Gaines's story, the all-white jury convicts Jefferson of murder, and the judge, seeing no reason Jefferson should not "pay for the part he played in this horrible crime," sentences him to death by electrocution.5 The story's poignancy comes from the questions it provokes concerning whether we have progressed beyond the 1940s capital punishment system it describes. Today, presumably, neither side's counsel would refer to an African-American defendant as a "hog." However, as demonstrated herein, racial discrimination continues to permeate death penalty decisions. In Green v. Texas, of the four people responsible for a murder, the petitioner, an African-American, was the only one charged with capital murder. Two African-American accomplices plea-bargained for prison sentences on aggravated robbery charges, and the fourth accomplice, a Caucasian, was not