marizing numerous capital punishment studies, confirmed "a consistent pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty." The GAO also revealed that those who murdered whites were more likely to be sentenced to Death Row than those who murdered blacks. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) nearly 40% of those executed since 1976 have been black although blacks only comprise 12% of the U.S. population. And in just about every death penalty case, the race of the victim was white. The DPIC goes on to report that in the previous year, 89% of the death sentences involved victims whom were white. U.S News and World Report writer Ted Gest reinforces his concept. He writes that on Death Row race really does matter. He points out that on Death Row whites and minorities are represented roughly equally. The disparity in allocation of the death penalty preempted the American Bar Association, in it's 1997 article "The Task Ahead; Reconciling Justice with Politics, to call for jurisdictions that exercise capital punishment to refrain from its use until fairness Whitehead 4 and due process could be assured. The ABA further called for the examination of procedures and practices for each state. State and federal justices have also spoken out against capital punishment according to Jack Callahan of the Rochester Institute of Technology. To point out an instance, Callahan cites U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun as declaring that he henceforth opposes the death penalty on the bases of the failure of the death penalty experiment. Blackmun, is further cited to state that the [potential] execution of an innocent individual comes "perilously to simple murder." Justice Clarence Thomas is cited as having stated that "the possibility of perjured testimony…mistaken testimony and human error remain all to real. We have no way of judging how many innocent people have be...
