defendant is significantly more likely to get the death penalty. In fact, a convicted black defendant is a better predictor of a death sentence than a conviction involving multiple stab wounds, or a murder committed in conjunction with another felony.
I think the far more troubling by Freeven pro"> by Freeven pro"> by Freeven pro"> by Freeven pro">measure
of the death penalty and race is the influence of the race of the victim. In most states, defendants convicted of killing white people are quite a bit more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants convicted of killing black people. That suggests that, whether intentionally or not, the criminal justice system puts a higher value on white lives than black lives. Moreover, studies that combine the race of both defendant and victim have found that a black defendant with a nonblack victim is by far the most likely to be executed, followed by a black defendant and black victim, a nonblack defendant and nonblack victim, and, far behind, a nonblack defendant and a black victim. These are percentages, by the way, not raw numbers. So they account for the fact that some of those categories have a larger sample size than others. (The Death Penalty Information Project has a summary of all of the aforementioned research, with footnotes, here.)
