African-featured defendants get death penalties mainly when victims are White.

Evidence

Eberhardt et al. (2006) applied a similar procedure to an investigation of death penalty cases in Philadelphia. Defendants who possessed more stereotypically African features (according to naïve raters) were more likely to receive the death penalty than defendants who possessed more stereotypically European features. Furthermore, this relationship held after controlling for many important potentially confounding factors (e.g., severity of the crime, socioeconomic status of defendant), but only for death penalty cases with White victims. When victims of the crime were Black, there was no relationship between stereotypical features and the likelihood of receiving the death penalty. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 861

Categorization

• XREF: The victim-race interaction is a sharp example of group-boundary effects on the measured bias — in-group/out-group victim status drives whether feature stereotyping operates. — connects to: Executions concentrate in the South and overwhelmingly involve white victims — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1989; Administering presumed guilt by area doubles down racialized vulnerability to death. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 508
• QUESTION: Why does victim race gate the feature-bias effect? Suggests an identity-protection mechanism where only harm to valued in-group activates bias — worth chasing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 861