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On April 22, 1987, the United States Supreme Court rejected a black man’s death penalty appeal grounded in claims of racial inequality and instead accepted proven racial sentencing disparities as “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.”
In October 1978, a black man named Warren McCleskey was convicted of killing a white police officer during a robbery and sentenced to death. On appeal, Mr. McCleskey’s lawyers argued that Georgia’s capital punishment system was racially biased in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In support of his argument, the lawyers presented statistical evidence that race significantly impacted the likelihood of a death sentence.
By EJI Staff, EJI
Full article @ EJI, A History of Racial Justice
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