A recent study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology about the U.S. Military death penalty system found that racial disparities among those sentenced to death are worse in the military than in other criminal courts. The study, conducted by Catherine Grosso of Michigan State's College of Law, the late David Baldus of the University of Iowa College of Law, and others, reviewed all potentially death-eligible military prosecutions from 1984 to 2005 and identified 105 death-eligible murder cases. The study found that defendants of color in the military are twice as likely as white defendants to be sentenced to death. The researchers said the disparities against defendants of color “sharply distinguishes the military system from the typical civilian system” at a “magnitude that is rarely seen in court systems.” In typical studies on the civilian side, the likelihood of a death sentence increased when the victim in the underlying crime was white, and was even more pronounced if the defendant was a person of color. In U.S. military courts, however, discrimination based on the race of defendant - regardless of the race of victim - was more prominent. The researchers argued that limiting the military death penalty to the most aggravated and heinous crimes - e.g., murder of a commissioned officer or a premeditated attack on U.S. troops resulting in death - would reduce racial disparities. Grosso concluded, “If race is on the table, if it puts a thumb on the scale, that’s injustice. These findings speak for themselves. They reflect how the military criminal justice system is operating, and it can do better.” Read the Study.
In one of the most comprehensive investigations ever undertaken about the execution of a possibly innocent defendant, Professor James Liebman and other researchers at Columbia University Law School have published a groundbreaking report on the case of Carlos DeLuna (pictured), who was executed in Texas in 1989. This "Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution" is being published today (May 15) in Columbia's Human Rights Law Review. Prof. Liebman concluded DeLuna was innocent and was wrongly convicted "on the thinnest of evidence: a single, nighttime, cross-ethnic eyewitness identification and no corroborating forensics." DeLuna maintained his innocence from the time of his arrest until his execution, claiming that the actual culprit was Carlos Hernandez, who looked so similar to DeLuna that friends and family had mistaken photos of the two men for each other. Prosecutors called Hernandez a "phantom" of DeLuna's imagination, although Hernandez was known to police and prosecutors because of his history of violent crimes, including armed robberies and an arrest for a murder similar to the one for which DeLuna was executed. Liebman's investigation found that Hernandez "spent years bragging around Corpus Christi that he, not his tocayo - his namesake and 'twin' - Carlos DeLuna, killed Wanda Lopez."
Recently published historical research led by Professor Austin Sarat (pictured) of Amherst College examines the way gruesome executions were reported in the media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Prof. Sarat's study found that newspapers generally presented two competing narratives in their coverage: “a sensationalist narrative, which played up the gruesomeness of botched execution[s], and an opposing, recuperative narrative, which sought to differentiate [the] law’s violence from violence outside the law.” (Article abstract) Gruesome executions were put into a larger context of an orderly and justified punishmnet: "They situated such executions within a framework that justified capital punishment as the proper way to avenge violent crimes. Problems were attributed to unavoidable human errors or technological breakdowns, and executions, even when they became gruesome spectacles, generally did not seem to inflict undue suffering on the condemned." The report, Gruesome Spectacles: The Cultural Reception of Botched Executions in America, reviewed newspaper accounts of botched executions between 1890 and 1920, and was published in inaugural issue of the British Journal of American Legal Studies.