Financial Times: “In theocratic states, apostates feature heavily on the rows of the condemned. In the US, it is African-Americans. Wherever the state chooses to play God, it tends to single out other people’s tribes. In the US, evidence of racial bias in capital sentencing is beyond doubt. It is not just that one in three of the people executed in America are black. It is that they tend to be executed for killing whites. Between 1977 and 2013, 47 per cent of all murder victims in America were black, according to ‘Black Lives Don’t Matter,’ a report by the University of North Carolina. Yet only 17 per cent of the victims were black in cases that resulted in execution.”
“Only the unseeing could miss the fact that the methods of US law enforcement are deeply skewed by race. US police officers shoot and kill upwards of 400 people a year. In some cases, they do so in genuine self defence. In others, there is obvious trigger-happiness. A disproportionate number of the victims are black. In no instances has the law enforcement officer in question ended up on death row. Very few even lose their jobs.”
“It is an irony that those who most strenuously defend the death penalty are often the greatest sceptics of government competence … If politicians feel unable to call for an end to what is unusually cruel, perhaps judges can step into the breach.”