Vengeance, only vengeance

After a decade break, the federal government is back in the retail killing business, thanks to the cruel enthusiasms of the Orange Cheeto, of his slimy obedient toady Bill Barr, and of a Supreme Court majority which privileges legalistic form over human justice. Add to that malevolent stew a dash of Law'nOrdure politics and you get three dead old men, at least one with Alzheimers, in a busy week at the death chamber in Indiana.

The death penalty is always arbitrary. Bad guys who are poor, whose lives are particularly repugnant, who have lousy lawyers, who are disproportionately of color, get the orders for execution. Other criminals with slightly better luck get long time, or even no time, for equally awful offenses.

The scholar of the death penalty Austin Sarat enumerates how "tough on crime" policies have distorted charging and sentencing in the federal courts.

A Department of Justice study published in 2000 found significant racial disparities in the department’s own handling of capital charging decisions. It reported that from 1995 to 2000, minority defendants were involved in 80% of the cases federal prosecutors referred to the department for consideration as capital prosecutions. In 72% of the cases approved for prosecution, the defendants were persons of color.

In addition, white defendants were twice as likely as members of racial minorities to be offered a plea deal with life in prison as the punishment.

Another study found a similar pattern in drug kingpin cases. The vast majority of defendants convicted under the 1988 law have been white. However, when the death penalty has been used in those kinds of cases, only 11% of the people convicted were white, while 89% were black or Hispanic.

And racial minorities now comprise 52% of the inmates awaiting execution at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, a figure only slightly lower than the 55% found on state death rows.

But race is not the only source of disparity in the federal system. Geography plays a key role as well in both charging and sentencing decisions.

From 1995 to 2000, 42% of the 183 federal death cases submitted to the Attorney General for review came from just 5 of the 94 federal districts.

Federal death verdicts, like those in the states, are concentrated in the states of the former confederacy. Three of them—Texas, Missouri, and Virginia—account for 40% of the total.

We endorse state killing of offenders because we feel some acts are so bad something has to be done. But the feeling makes bad law. The Los Angeles Times has been through California's death penalty wars and knows what to ask:

... This is justice?

Backers of the death penalty argue that it is there to dispose of the “worst of the worst,” but in practice it falls disproportionately on people of color, the poor and the mentally ill, and executions usually come so long after the crime itself that there no longer is a penological justification for it.

So we’re left with vengeance for the sake of vengeance, even if it means letting the government kill its own citizens, a brazenly excessive use of government power.

One more injustice that's got to end.