ed dead at 2:00 A.M., becoming the fifth man to die in under two hours. All five of theses prisoners were African-American and from eastern Texan counties. These first five executions were coined the “harvest of death” (Marquart 19).Many critics of capitol punishment argue that because criminals receive different penalties for the same crime, the death penalty discriminates. It is argued that wealth, race, gender, and geographical location all effect who gets the death penalty and who doesn’t. When presented with the facts, one may find that more blacks than whites have been executed in Texas, and many agree that it is the case in many other states as well. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled on the case of McCleskey v. Kemp, a race case. Warren McCleskey was a black man who had been convicted of killing a white police officer. He claimed the Georgia’s death penalty laws were discriminatory. McCleskey argued that because he was black and his victim was white the prosecutor was more likely to seek the death penalty. The court disagreed. It said that those who asked for the death penalty, in McCleskey’s case, were not doing so on the basis of racial discrimination. However, in general, it can be very difficult to prove when someone is purposely trying to discriminate (Almonte 25). When looking for racial motivation, one must consider many other elements before judging the Texan court system. Just under half of the 421 offenders sentenced to death in Texas between 1974 and 1988 were convicted in counties that define the six major metropolitan regions of the state. Nearly 60 percent of the capital murderers were in their twenties during the time of their arrest. Six offenders were seventeen years old when arrested. The oldest, Margarito Bravo, was 55 when arrested in 1976 for killing a police officer. These inmates were evenly split between Anglo and non-Anglo males (36 percent were African-American, 14 percent ...
