New study says Louisiana’s system of execution is one in ‘disrepair’

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

Black Lives Matter has become a rallying cry for thousands of activists across the country for more than a year, heightening a debate over policing in the wake of high-profile officer-involved shootings. But a new study of capital punishment in Louisiana also calls into question the value of Black lives versus the lives of the state’s white majority when it comes to how the state metes out the death penalty.

A new white paper from the University of North Carolina details stark differences in the race of who the state chooses to execute and for what crimes capital punishment is seen as justified sentencing. Homicides of white residents are 10 times more likely to result in an execution than criminal deaths of Blacks. Homicides of white women are 48 times more likely to yield capital punishment than those of Black men.

Prof. Frank Baumgartner, who authored the study, said “…these racial…disparities are not measured by a few percentage points of difference. Rather, they differ by orders of magnitude, demonstrating that Louisiana’s death penalty is plagued by vast inequities which will undermine public confidence in the state’s ability to carry out the death penalty in a fair and impartial manner” in a news release.

Louisiana’s system of capital punishment has long been under scrutiny as death row inmates continue to battle the state on temperature indexes inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which are reported to reach well over 100 degrees in the summer months. The years-long legal wrangling between the state and three inmates facing capital punishment has not aided the public perception of death sentencing.

The report also highlights the overwhelming favorability that white homicide victims, and their families, enjoy in the pursuit of justice. Seventy-nine percent of the individuals executed in Louisiana in the modern era were convicted of killing white victims even though white victims are only 26 percent of all murder victims in the state. Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College, called the state’s system of execution one in “disrepair.”

Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science, said Louisiana’s problem, while more stark than other states, is not unique and represents a “pervasive problem” connected to administering the death penalty, citing recent attention to a spate of botched executions and the controversial search for drug cocktails to kill inmates as pharmacies and medial professionals back away from aiding state executions. Louisiana has come under fire as recently as 2014 for illegally obtaining drug cocktails for executions.

Sarat co-authored the book From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State which paints a picture connecting the states that were home to the lynching era of the early 1900s, mostly of Black southern men, to who today are home to high rates of capital punishment, mostly involving Black and Hispanic men. Sarat said the reasons for the racial gap in capital sentencing “speak for themselves,” calling the death penalty as a tool and its political application a nationwide “mechanism for maintaining racial privilege.”

The UNC study also states that 74 percent of death sentences in Louisiana in the past 40 years have been for killing a white victim. Additionally, “there are no documented cases in the entire history of Louisiana,” according to the report, “where a White person has been executed for killing a Black male.”

The full study will appear this fall in the New Orleans Journal of Public Interest Law published by Loyola University.

This article originally published in the September 21, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.