Killing with Prejudice: Institutionalized Racism in American Capital Punishment

A history of the McCleskey v. Kemp Supreme Court ruling that effectively condoned racism in capital cases

In 1978 Warren McCleskey, a black man, killed a white police officer in Georgia. He was convicted by a jury of 11 whites and 1 African American, and was sentenced to death. Although McCleskey’s lawyers were able to prove that Georgia courts applied the death penalty to blacks who killed whites four times as often as when the victim was black, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence ...