Atwater, Race and the Needle: We are not so far removed from the urge to kill
Demario Atwater may feel this more keenly than most. Atwater, 23, is one
of two men accused of robbing and shooting UNC Chapel Hill student body
president Eve Carson in March 2008.
Federal prosecutors are seeking the needle. This week, Atwater’s attorneys filed reams of motions in Winston-Salem, asking a judge to take the death penalty off the table on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
Killing people, they submitted, interferes with the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution.
It does, of course, but capital punishment has always been applied to citizens whose other Constitutional rights — liberty, for starters — are also in jeopardy. Our system’s punishments are all, in the end, about limiting or revoking some of the rights of citizenship. One example: In North Carolina, felons can’t vote while they’re in prison, on parole or on probation.
We are more interested in the part of Atwater’s motion that argues that capital punishment is applied with both racial and regional biases.
In other words, his lawyers said, federal prosecutors are more likely to seek capital punishment for black men in the South than for white defendants, or for defendants of either race in other parts of the country.
The Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project studied 435 federal death penalty cases since 1988. Of those, only 26 percent of the defendants were white. The American Civil Liberties Union did a similar study in 2007 and found that the chances of a federal case being authorized for the death penalty is 84 percent higher when the victim is white, regardless of the race of the defendant.
FULL STORY
Federal prosecutors are seeking the needle. This week, Atwater’s attorneys filed reams of motions in Winston-Salem, asking a judge to take the death penalty off the table on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
Killing people, they submitted, interferes with the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution.
It does, of course, but capital punishment has always been applied to citizens whose other Constitutional rights — liberty, for starters — are also in jeopardy. Our system’s punishments are all, in the end, about limiting or revoking some of the rights of citizenship. One example: In North Carolina, felons can’t vote while they’re in prison, on parole or on probation.
We are more interested in the part of Atwater’s motion that argues that capital punishment is applied with both racial and regional biases.
In other words, his lawyers said, federal prosecutors are more likely to seek capital punishment for black men in the South than for white defendants, or for defendants of either race in other parts of the country.
The Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project studied 435 federal death penalty cases since 1988. Of those, only 26 percent of the defendants were white. The American Civil Liberties Union did a similar study in 2007 and found that the chances of a federal case being authorized for the death penalty is 84 percent higher when the victim is white, regardless of the race of the defendant.
FULL STORY
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