6.6.4: The Death Penalty and Bias
As you know, capital punishment, the death penalty, is the most extreme measure the state takes.
As you also know, the death penalty arouses both impassioned opposition and support.
Advances in DNA testing have given opponents of the death penalty a strong argument:
Innocent people have been sent to death row, and some have been executed.
Others are just as passionate about retaining the death penalty.
They point to such crimes as those of the serial killers discussed in the following Down-to-Earth Sociology.
Down-to-Earth Sociology The Killer Next Door: Serial Murderers in Our Midst Here is my experience with serial killers.
As I was watching television one night, I was stunned by the images coming from Houston, Texas.
Television cameras showed the police digging up dozens of bodies from under a boat storage shed.
A few days later, I drove from Illinois, where I was teaching, to Houston, where 33-year-old Dean Corll had befriended Elmer Wayne Henley and David Brooks, two teenagers from broken homes.
Together, they had killed twenty-seven boys.
Elmer and David would pick up young hitchhikers and deliver them to Corll to rape and kill.
They even brought him their neighbors and high school classmates.
On a city map, I plotted the locations of the homes of the local murder victims.
Many clustered around the homes of the teenage killers.
I then talked to one of Elmer’s neighbors, as he was painting his front porch.
His 15-year-old son had gone to get a haircut one Saturday morning.
That was the last time he saw his son alive.
The police refused to investigate.
They insisted that his son had run away.
I decided to spend my coming sabbatical writing a novel on this case.
To get into the minds of the killers, I knew that I would have to “become” them day after day.
Corll kept a piece of plywood in his apartment.
In each of its corners, he had cut a hole.
He and the boys would spread-eagle their handcuffed victims on this board and torture and rape them for hours.
Sometimes, they would even pause to order pizza.
I began to be concerned about immersing myself in torture and human degradation.
Would I be the same person afterward?
I decided not to write the book.
The three killers led double lives so successfully that their friends and family were unaware of their criminal activities.
Henley’s mother swore to me that her son couldn’t possibly be guilty—he was a good boy.
Some of Elmer’s high school friends told me that his being involved in homosexual rape and murder was ridiculous—he was interested only in girls.
I was interviewing them in Henley’s bedroom, and for proof, they pointed to a pair of girls’ panties that were draped across a lamp shade.
Serial murder is killing three or more victims in separate events.
The murders may occur over several days, weeks, or years.
The elapsed time between murders distinguishes serial killers from mass murderers, those who do their killing all at once.
Here are some infamous examples: During the 1960s and 1970s, Ted Bundy, shown here, raped and killed dozens of women in four states.
Ted Bundy is shown here on trial in Miami for killing two women, both college students.
He often used charm and wit to win the confidence of his victims.
Like most serial killers, he blended in with society.
Bundy was executed for his murders.
Credit: AP Images Between 1974 and 1991, Dennis Rader killed ten people in Wichita, Kansas.
Rader had written to the newspapers, proudly calling himself the BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill) strangler.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Aileen Wuornos hitchhiked along Florida’s freeways. She killed seven men after having sex with them.
In 2009, Anthony Sowell of Cleveland, Ohio, was discovered living with eleven decomposing bodies of women he had raped and strangled (Robbins 2009).
The serial killer with the most victims appears to be Virginia de Souza, a physician in Brazil, who, between 2006 and 2014, is thought to have killed 320 patients to “free up the wards.”
She injected her victims with muscle relaxants and then cut off their air supply.
She said she was a “go-between on the springboard to the next life” (Bowater 2013).
Is serial murder more common now than it used to be? Not likely.
In the past, police departments had little communication with one another, and seldom did anyone connect killings in different jurisdictions.
Today’s more efficient communications and investigative techniques, coupled with DNA matching, make it easier for the police to know when a serial killer is operating in an area.
Part of the perception that there are more serial killers today is also due to ignorance of our history: In our frontier past, for example, serial killers went from ranch to ranch.
For Your Consideration
→ Do you think that serial killers should be given the death penalty?
Why or why not?
→ How does your social location influence your opinion on the death penalty? Hearing from the Author: Serial Murderers
Geography It is clear that the death penalty is not administered evenly.
Consider geography: You can see from the Social Map that where people commit murder greatly affects their chances of being put to death.
Figure 6.5 Executions in the United States
NOTE: Executions since 1977, when the death penalty was restored. The executions in states without the death penalty occurred before those states banned the death penalty. SOURCE: Based on Bureau of Justice Statistics 2014b. Statistical Abstract of the United States 2019: Table 385. The following interactive is not accessible to keyboard and screen reader users. What follows is an explanation of what appears on the screen. A U.S. state map shows data for executions observed in the U.S. based on "States without death penalty, States with death penalty that have not executed anyone, and States with death penalty." An inset at bottom-right shows highest number of executions in "Texas (518), Virginia (110), Oklahoma (111)."The number of executions conducted in different states of the U.S. is categorized under the following three categories as follows:States without death penaltyo North Dakota (0)o Nebraska (3)o New Mexico (1)o Alaska (0)o Hawaii (0)o Minnesota (0)o Iowa (0)o Wisconsin (0)o Illinois (12)o Michigan (0)o West Virginia (0)o New York (0)o Vermont (0)o Maine (0)o Massachusetts (0)o New Jersey (0)o Connecticut (1/0o Maryland (5)o Washington D.C. (0)States with death penalty that have not executed anyoneo Kansas (0)o New Hampshire (0)o Rhode Island (0)States with death penaltyo Washington (5)o Oregon (2)o California (13)o Nevada (12)o Montana (3)o Idaho (3)o Utah (7)o Wyoming (1)o Colorado (1)o Arizona (37)o South Dakota (3)o Texas (538)o Oklahoma (112)o Missouri (87)o Arkansas (27)o Louisiana (28)o Indiana (20)o Ohio (53)o Pennsylvania (3)o Dover (16)o Kentucky (3)o Tennessee (6)o Alabama (58)o Mississippi (21)o Georgia (69)o Florida (92)o South Carolina (23)o North Carolina (23)o Virginia (111)The highest number of executions is as follows:o Texas (538)o Virginia (111)o Oklahoma (112)Note: Executions since 1977, when the death penalty was restored. The executions in states without the death penalty occurred before those states banned the death penalty. 188 Social Class The death penalty also shows social class bias. As you know from news reports, it is rare for a rich person to be sentenced to death. Although the government does not collect statistics on social class and the death penalty, this common observation is borne out by the education of the prisoners on death row. Half of the prisoners on death row (47 percent) have not finished high school (Statistical Abstract 2019: Table 385).
Gender
There is also gender bias in the death penalty. Gender bias is so strong that it is almost unheard of for a woman to be sentenced to death, much less executed.
Although women commit 9.6 percent of the murders, they make up only 1.8 percent of death row inmates (Statistical Abstract 2019: Table 385)
. Even on death row, the gender bias continues: Of those condemned to death, the state is much more likely to execute a man than a woman. As Figure 6.6 shows, of the 5,267 prisoners executed in the United States since 1930, only 47, a mere 0.9 percent, have been women. Rather than gender bias, perhaps the chances of being sentenced to death or being executed reflect the women’s previous offenses and the relative brutality of their murders. Not likely, but maybe.
We need research to find out. Figure 6.6
Who Gets Executed?
Gender Bias in Capital Punishment
Race–Ethnicity At one point, racial–ethnic bias was so flagrant that the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to the death penalty. Donald Partington (1965), a lawyer in Virginia, was shocked by the bias he saw in the courtroom, and he decided to document it.
He found that 2,798 men had been convicted for rape and attempted rape in Virginia between 1908 and 1963—56 percent whites and 44 percent blacks.
For rape, 41 men had been executed.
For attempted rape, 13 had been executed.
All those executed were black. Not one of the whites was executed.
After listening to evidence like this, in 1972 the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty, as applied, was unconstitutional.
The execution of prisoners stopped—but not for long.
The states wrote new laws, and in 1977, they again began to execute prisoners.
Since the death penalty was reinstituted, 57 percent of those put to death have been white, 34 percent African American, and 8 percent Latinos (Statistical Abstract 2019: Table 385).
189 It is difficult to say precisely what role racial–ethnic bias plays in these totals, especially because they reflect the much higher murder rate of blacks.
Yet, here are two indications of how real racial bias is in the criminal justice system: In general, white jurors are more likely to convict black defendants than white defendants (Anwar et al. 2012).
In murder trials, if the victim is white and the accused is black, juries are more likely to impose the death penalty than if the accused is white and the victim is black (Baumgartner et al. 2015).
Yet other evidence shows that jurors have greater bias against white defendants (Frank 2019).
The official responses to deviance that we have discussed assume that the state (government) is functioning.
What happens when the state breaks down? Let’s consider this in the following Thinking Critically about Social Life.
Thinking Critically about Social Life Vigilantes: When the State Breaks Down Residents of a town outside Veracruz, Mexico, were surprised one morning when they awoke to see the bodies of nine men and two women.
The bodies, nude or partially clothed and bound at the ankles, showed the scars of torture. On one of the bodies was this sign: “You want a war, you’ll get a war” (Woody 2017).
And the war is on. A national meeting of states attorneys was to be held in a ritzy convention center in the capital city of the state of Veracruz.
Two days before the meeting, a convoy of gunmen dressed in black drove up to the convention center.
There they abandoned two trucks.
In the trucks were the bodies of 35 men and women (de Cordoba 2017).
Many of us chafe under the coercive nature of the state: the IRS, Homeland Security, the NSA, the many police agencies from the CIA and FBI to who knows how many other groups that go by three capital letters.
Little cameras litter society, seemingly recording our every move. We certainly have given up a lot of freedoms—and we are likely to give up many more in the name of security.
We can chafe and complain all we want, but as stressed at the end of the preceding chapter, this wave of surveillance has tremendous momentum and is seemingly unstoppable.
There is another side to what is happening. The guns that the many uniformed and plainclothes men and women are carrying can also be aimed at us.
But for now, they bring security. They indicate that the state is operating; perhaps overreaching, but functioning quite well.
What happens when the state fails, when the men and women who are authorized to carry guns don’t protect citizens from the bad guys who carry guns?
One reaction is vigilantism, people taking the law into their own hands.
Remember what we call the Wild West?
Citizens armed themselves, formed posses, chased the bad guys, and dispensed quick justice at the end of a rope.
You’ve seen the movies. And something like this is happening in Mexico.
From the local to the national, the Mexican government has failed.
The drug lords have infiltrated the police and the politicians.
“El Chapo” Guzman, who headed the feared Sinaloa cartel, used to drive openly into the state capital in an armored SUV.
Guzman would even meet with the state governor (Johnson 2014).
He was later convicted in a U.S. court of smuggling 200 tons of drugs into the United States.
He used speedboats, fishing boats, tunnels, trains, trucks, cars, airplanes, and submarines (Feuer 2019).
It is difficult to overstate the extent of corruption in Mexico, but let’s add a couple more shocking findings.
The man who directed Mexico’s national drug enforcement agency was on the drug lords’ payroll.
Army generals take money to protect drug deals.
A secret billion-dollar bank account was traced to the brother of Mexico’s president.
(But why rush to judgment?
Perhaps some taxi driver gave the president’s brother a billion-dollar tip because he was a good passenger.)
In Gomez Palacio, prison administrators let prisoners out so they could kill members of a rival drug gang.
They even loaned the prisoners their guns and cars to do the killing.
Afterward, the men dutifully returned to the prison, turned in the cars and guns, and went back to their cells.
Incredible, I know. But true.
Not all of Mexico’s officials are corrupt, and the drug war—between the state and the cartels, as well as between rival cartels—has grown in ferocity.
The state uses Black Hawk helicopters to fire on houses, and the cartels have used high-powered weapons to shoot one of them down (Woody 2017).
Some surmise that in its frustration the Mexican government has become more interested in killing drug dealers than in arresting them.
One thing is evident: Despite the arrest or killing of many top leaders, the cartels continue to thrive.
Shooting deaths by the police, the army, and the gangsters—with it sometimes difficult to distinguish which is which—run over 200,000 (Reyner 2019).
In Iguala, a town in the state of Guerrero, the mayor is accused of ordering his police to arrest forty-three college students and turn them over to the local drug cartel to be killed (Feuer 2019).
The cartels have kidnapped so many young men and women that mothers of missing children have formed groups to search for hidden graves.
In the state of Veracruz, these despairing women found a mass burial site that contained 249 bodies (de Cordoba 2017).
The Mexican people have begun to take the law into their own hands.
In the state of Guerrero, country folk put on masks, grabbed their old hunting rifles, raided the homes of drug dealers, and put them in makeshift jails. Blockading the roads leading to their little towns, they won’t let drug dealers, or any strangers, in.
This includes the federal police, the state police, and the army, all of which they distrust. The official “enforcers of the law” are too corrupt, they say.
They trust only the neighbors they grew up with.
With the state claiming the right to use violence only for itself, a conflict between the vigilantes and the state is inevitable.
And it has begun. In the state of Michoacan, the people took up arms against the Knights Templar, the drug cartel that is terrorizing their area.
As the citizen militias were gaining the upper hand, the military stepped in to stop them.
This confused the people, who asked why the military was trying to disarm them and not the drug cartel. “First we must disarm you, so there won’t be bloodshed,” the military replied. “Then we can go after the drug dealers.”
This didn’t make sense to the people, and they resisted.
The military killed several of the citizens. Here is a quick wrap-up.
The city of Acapulco has more murders a year than Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Holland put together (Luhnow and Sabartes 2018).
“Enough is enough!” This physician (center) in Michoacan, Mexico, organized vigilantes to replace the corrupt police.
The police arrested him for carrying illegal guns.
Credit: Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters
For Your Consideration
→ We don’t yet know the consequences of this incipient vigilante movement in Mexico. But what else can the citizens do?
