Title: States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates | Death Penalty Information Center
Headings: States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates
States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates
Content: It is rare that a wealthy white man gets executed, if it happens at all,” Mr. McCann said. Those who “have labored long in the criminal justice system know, supported by a variety of studies and extensive personal experience, that blacks get the harsher hand in criminal justice and particularly in capital punishment cases,” Mr. McCann wrote in “Opposing Capital Punishment: A Prosecutor’s Perspective,” published in the Marquette Law Review in 1996. Forty-three percent of the people on death row across the country are African-Americans, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The death penalty also has been employed much more often when the victim was white — 82 percent of the victims of death row inmates were white, while only 50 percent of all homicide victims were white. Supporters of capital punishment who say that executions are justified by the heinous nature of some crimes often cite the case of Jeffrey L. Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered at least 17 boys and men, and ate flesh from at least one of his victims. Mr. McCann prosecuted Mr. Dahmer, but the case did not dissuade him from his convictions on the death penalty. “ To participate in the killing of another human being, it diminishes the respect for life. Period,” Mr. McCann said. He added, “Although I am a district attorney, I have a gut suspicion of the state wielding the power o