Racism and The Death Penalty
Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has been
fighting the racism and brutality infecting the criminal justice
system since our inception in 1991. Sadly, once again, with the
horrific murder of George Floyd we are reminded of these
outrages. And to their eradication.
In 2000, the Joint Legislative and Review Commission (JLARC)
published a Review of Virginia’s System of Capital Punishment.
Researchers found that a person is more than three times as
likely to be sentenced to death when the victim is white versus
when the victim is black.
In 2003 the ACLU Capital Punishment Project released Broken
Justice: The Death Penalty in Virginia. It found that the JLARC
study underestimated the disparate impact of race in Virginia's
death penalty system.
Nationally, the numbers are shockingly stark. According to the
Death Penalty Information Center, among those executed for
interracial murders in the United States, 295 black people were
executed for killing a white victim. Only 21 white perpetrators
were executed for killing a black victim.
Of the 1,390 documented executions carried out in Virginia since
1608, only four involved a white person killing a black man or
woman, all of them since 1997.
In other words, it took 390 years for the Virginia criminal justice
system to determine that the life of a black person was, in some
limited circumstances, to be judged equivalent in value to the
life of a white person.
In many respects, the death penalty is a poster child for
everything wrong with our criminal justice system - blatant
racial disparities, police and prosecutor misconduct and its
propensity for convicting innocent men and women.
While we in Virginia can see the abolition of the death penalty in
our state in the near future, addressing the deep-seated issues of
institutional racism and lack of accountability for police and
prosecutor misconduct are deeper challenges.
However long and difficult the journey may be, VADP stands
united with activists and protestors, using their Constitutionally
protected rights to petition government, as they push for
change. We urge all of those who believe capital punishment is
a gross abuse of power to join us as we salute those on the front
lines of change.
Kristina Leslie Michael Stone
President Executive Director
