ite man who kills a black person. In Texas in1991, blacks made up 12 percent of the population, but 48 percent of the prisonpopulation and 55.5 percent of those on death row are black (Baker 127). Before the1970s, when the death penalty for rape was still used in many states, no white men wereguilty of raping nonwhite women, whereas most black offenders found guilty of raping awhite woman were executed. This data shows how the death penalty can discriminate andbe used on certain races rather than equally as punishment for severe crimes. And third,poor and friendless defendants, those who are inexperienced or of court-appointedcounsel, are most likely to be sentenced to death and executed. Defenders of the deathpenalty, however, argue that, because nothing found in the laws of capital punishmentcauses sexist, racist, or class bias in its use, these kinds of discrimination are not asufficient reason for abolishing the death penalty on the idea that it discriminates orviolates the 8th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Opponents of capitalpunishment have replied to this by saying that the death penalty is subject to miscarriage ofjustice and that it would be impossible to administer fairly.In the 1970s, a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions made the death penalty inthe U.S. unconstitutional, if it is mandatory, if it is imposed without providing courts withadequate guidance to make the right decision in the severity of the sentence, or if it isimposed for a crime that does not take or threaten the life of another human being. Thedeath penalty was also confined to crimes of murder, including felony murder. A felonymurder is any homicide committed in the course of committing another felony, such asrape or robbery. After the 1972 court ruling that all but a few capital statutes wereunconstitutional, thirty-seven states revised and reenacted their death penalty laws. In1989 the Supreme Court decided that the death penalty could be...
