Black defendants face death sentences most when victims are White.

Evidence

The researchers controlled for an array of legally relevant variables, including aggravating circumstances, mitigating circumstances, brutality of the homicide, defendant’s and victim’s socioeconomic status, and varying levels of culpability. Consistent with the Second Law-of-Law, use of logistic regression analyses revealed that, at average levels of culpability, subordinates (i.e., Blacks) were most likely to be condemned to death for the capital murder of a dominant and were least likely to be condemned to death for the capital murder of another subordinate. Furthermore, the race of victim/ race of defendant combination least likely to result in a death sentence was in the capital murder of a subordinate at the hands of a dominant (see Baldus, Woodworth, Zuckerman, & Weiner, 1998; see also Grosso, O’Brien, Taylor, & Woodworth, 2014). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 72

Categorization

• BMF: The pattern that hierarchy itself shapes who is punished most—the subordinate who kills a dominant is the gravest crime—evokes Things Fall Apart’s colonial logic where the most severe reprisals fall on those who strike against the ruling order, though the mapping is thematic rather than plot-specific.
• XREF: connects to: Executions concentrate in the South and overwhelmingly involve white victims — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1989