Houston Has a Problem With Death-Penalty Disparities, Study Says
A study of capital punishment in Harris County, Texas, has found two kinds of racial disparities in capital punishment.
One disparity, which has been well-documented in studies elsewhere, found that killers of whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of blacks, the New York Times reports in a Sidebar column by Adam Liptak. The other, more surprising disparity is that blacks are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites when the nature of the crime is taken into account.
Previous studies that control for the type of crime committed have never proven that blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites.
The researcher, sociology and criminology professor Scott Phillips of the University of Denver, is publishing his results this fall in the Houston Law Review. In the last 30 years, Harris County has sentenced more than 100 defendants to death, more than any other state except for Texas.
Phillips says that when the nature of the crime is taken into account, “the odds of a death trial are 1.75 times higher against black defendants than white defendants.” The odds of a defendant receiving a death sentence after a trial, when the study controlled for the nature of the crime, were 1.49 times higher for black defendants.
Phillips studied death sentences from the years 1992 to 1999 in Harris County, which includes Houston.
