Blacks account for 13% of USA population the last time I looked...they are executed @ 2 ½ times that rate according to these statistics. Thanks for sharing...
Women make up 50.5% of the population and we've put TWO to death in the last eight years.
Why?
Because
THAT'S NOT HOW STATISTICS WORK!!!
95% of the murders are committed by men, but they make up 99.9% of those executed, but only 49% of the population. But nobody would dare say this means the death penalty is somehow "sexist" against men.
Re: your point in another post about it's usually poor and/or minority executed.
But who commits the murders?
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and for that matter most people with six-figure salaries aren't going to commit a murder personally; at most, they'll hire a hit man (another issue of equality that sorta hits at the "boys in girl's sports" argument given you virtually never hear of a hit WOMAN, even though you'd think that would be a more difficult case to solve). Inevitably, any sort of death penalty is going to be carried out against someone who doesn't exactly have a lot of means to hire someone, hire a good lawyer, or escape to another country.
Now having said all that for information purposes....as noted above, I used to really be "for" it until too many cases of prosecutorial misconduct and even someone in my career field sink testing* and providing false positives that led to a mass release of wrongly convicted criminals in Massachusetts (and it now appears Annie Dookhan was hardly alone) led me to have to say "we have to be 100% sure."
Bin Laden? Yes
Saddam? Yes
McVeigh? Yes
Tsarnaev? Yes
And I could probably name a dozen others if I thought real hard about it. So I'm VERY RELUCTANT to risk taking an innocent life. As bad as 20 years in the can (with apologies to Phil Leotardo) is, at least if we release them later and pay them a settlement, we haven't killed them.
*Sink testing is a deceitful laboratory practice also known as dry labbing. There are several ways to do this. A lab tech may run the positive control or a diluted mix of the positive control or even inject a known patient sample's previous positive into another patient sample. The central point, however it occurs, is the laboratory technologist DOES NOT RUN the authentic/pristine patient's sample but in some way compromises the results. This is why it never supposed to be known in a laboratory precisely WHOSE sample you have (e.g. you run sample NUMBERS and report out the results, never knowing who the patient is - because it might be someone famous or a famous case).
The most effective "sink testers" are very difficult to catch - because they do 90% of the normal work to cover their tracks with paperwork, results that show the sample number and LOOK authentic, and there's nothing obviously wrong. If a higher up asks to see the sample for review, you can provide one that the higher up doesn't necessarily know is compromised.
