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CounterPunch
March 8,
2003
Race and the Death
Penalty in Pennsylvania
Will Rendell
Act?
By DAVID LINDORFF
The death penalty moratorium movement, fresh from
a big win in Illinois, has now latched onto a bigger target:
Pennsylvania, the state with the fourth largest death row in
the country with 244 people awaiting execution, 70 percent of
them non-white.
On March 4, a committee of prominent
legal experts appointed by the state's supreme court (no slouch
when it comes to upholding death sentences), issued a 500-page
report detailing the evidence of rampant bias in the state's
criminal justice system. Not only does the report demonstrate
that minorities--especially blacks--are disturbingly more likely
to get the death penalty than whites--they are more likely to
be convicted of crimes at all levels. The report, called The Pennsylvania  Supreme
Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Justice System also documents how Pennsylvania prosecutors
also regularly remove as many blacks as possible from capital
juries during the death-qualifying process of jury selection,
making conviction of black defendants easier.
Faced with the incontrovertible evidence
it found of this racist contamination of the judicial process,
the supreme court racial and gender bias committee has called
on all three branches of the state's government, the governor,
the legislature, and the supreme court itself, to establish a
moratorium on executions until the problem can be addressed through
court reforms, new rules for prosecutors, and changes in state
law.
Lissette McCormack, director of the committee
and lead author of the study, says that each of the three branches
of government is capable of independently instituting a moratorium
on the death process. "The governor has the authority to
order a reprieve for all prisoners on death row," she says.
"It cannot be permanent, but it could last until reforms
are made in the system." She adds that the legislature could
pass a law imposing a moratorium, while the supreme court would
be able to block executions on a case-by-case basis.
The committee's dramatic call for action
puts enormous pressure on the state's new Democratic governor,
Ed Rendell, to do something. A former prosecutor himself, Rendell,
who served two terms as district attorney of Philadelphia from
1978 to 1986, helped put over 40 people, most of them black,
on Pennsylvania's death row. (Among those condemned to death
under Rendell's direction is Mumia Abu-Jamal, one of the state's
longest surviving death-row inmates. Abu-Jamal's case is slated
to move next to the Third Circuit Court of Appeal, where his
lawyers plan to present evidence demonstrating that the DA's
office deliberately used peremptory challenges to improperly
bar 11 of 15 otherwise qualified black jurors from serving on
his jury.)
During his run for governor last fall,
Rendell promised he would impose a death penalty moratorium if
he saw evidence that the law was unfair (polls have shown that
70 percent of residents in the state would support a moratorium),
but prior to issuance of the committee report, had said he had
seen no such evidence. Rendell, who took office in January, has
already signed one new death warrant.
Now that the committee has spoken, it
will be harder for the governor, who won his seat largely thanks
to the black vote in his home area of Philadelphia, to claim
the state's capital punishment system is fair and without problems.
In fact, the Philadelphia DA's office
has long been, and continues to be the main cause of much of
the inherent racism in the state's justice system. Fully 85 percent
of the prisoners dispatched to Pennsylvania's burgeoning death
row by Philadelphia prosecutors have been black, though the city
is only 44 percent African-American.
Death penalty proponents have long criticized
such statistics, claiming that far more homicides are committed
by blacks, thus accounting for the skewed figures, but McCormack
fires back that this is an intellectually dishonest argument.
"They'll never explain how they're defining those homicides,"
she says. "Are they talking about homicide convictions?
If so that's a tautology. If they're talking about people charged
with homicide, then that doesn't tell you anything either, because
the process of charging people is also racially biased."
White killers, she suggests, are often charged with manslaughter
where blacks committing the same offense get charged with first-degree
murder.
Jeff Garis, executive director of Pennsylvania
Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty, has called for
a stepped up campaign to press for a moratorium on executions
in the state. Citing the committee's call for a moratorium on
death, he says, "Now is the time to seize the momentum and
demand, demand, demand that officials at all levels of state
government abide by the recommendations in this report"
he says, adding, "Opportunities like this can become turning
points -- if we capitalize on them."
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
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