The Badger Herald

OPINION & EDITORIAL

Death penalty reveals racial woes

by Guest Columnist

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

On Nov. 7, Wisconsin voters will go to the polls not only to determine who will control the House and Senate and not only to decide whether Wisconsin joins the loathsome company of states with amendments banning gay marriage. Voters will also be deciding on an advisory referendum on whether Wisconsin should reinstate the death penalty. I use the word reinstate because Wisconsin did, in fact, have the death penalty at one period in our history. That period ended in 1858, granting Wisconsin the honor of being the state that has been death-penalty-free longer than any other in the Union. It would be a terrible shame if we lost this honor Nov. 7.

It would be an act of criminal legislation if our Legislature were to bring back a law whose abolition predated that of slavery. Two special features of Wisconsin law make our state peculiarly ill suited for a reintroduction of the death penalty. First, we already have a lower murder rate than any state that currently imposes the death penalty. Restarting the machinery of death would do nothing to lower our crime rate. Second, and even more disturbing, we have the nation's highest black incarceration rate. This means Wisconsin imprisons a higher proportion of its black citizens than any other state.

Other aspects of our criminal "justice" system bear out this disgusting trend: More blacks than whites go to prison for parole violations, and whites typically get sent to prison for violent crimes, while 67 times as many blacks as whites go to prison for drug-related crimes. The fact of the matter is that Wisconsin's legal system is racist to the core.

If Wisconsin were to reinstate the death penalty, the massive injustice of our own court system would be combined with the obscene racism of the death penalty. Nationally, blacks make up about 12 percent of the population, but consist of 42 percent of those on death row. Even though blacks and whites make up roughly even percentages of murder victims, 80 percent of those on death row went for murdering a white person. In the 30 years since the death penalty was reinstated nationally, of the over 1,000 people executed, only 12 whites have been executed for murdering an African-American.

Thus, the death penalty in Wisconsin would be a hideous amalgam of the racism of our own courts combined with that of the system as a whole. According to the African-American magazine The Black Commentator, Wisconsin won the rather dubious award last year of being the worst state in the country for blacks to live. Do we really want to give the racism in our state more institutional power?

To those good liberals among my readership who may protest that, with the dedicated efforts of good-hearted people, the racism of the death penalty could be eliminated, I must refer you to the Supreme Court's judgment on the matter. In 1986, in a ruling upholding the death penalty, Justice Lewis Powell opined that racial discrimination in death penalty cases is "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system." More recently, Justice Harry Black wrote that, "Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die." The death penalty's intrinsic racism does not stem from the fact that those who run it are racist (though many of them certainly are), but from its being part and parcel, along with the entire criminal justice system, of the machinery of white supremacy in America. The grossly disproportionate incarceration of black men has contributed massively to continuing poverty in the black community. The Black Commentator sums up this process: "Almost one in three 18-year-old black males across the board is likely to catch a felony conviction … A felony conviction in America is a stunningly accurate predictor of a life of insecure employment at poverty-level wages and no health care, of fragile family ties, of low educational attainment and limited or no civic participation, and a strong likelihood of re-imprisonment."

This process is by no means accidental. Politicians have long stirred up racism as a tool for getting votes. Bill Clinton is probably the most disgusting example of this. To prove how tough he was on crime, Clinton flew home to Arkansas in the middle of his 1992 campaign to oversee the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black man. Rector was so mentally handicapped that he saved the dessert from his last supper so he could eat it after his execution.

In short, the death penalty is one of the most brutal edges of white supremacy in America today. To reinstate it in Wisconsin would be a criminal expansion of racism in our state.

Paul Heideman is a graduate student in the Department of African-American Studies and a member of the International Socialist Organization