Capital Punishment and Discrimination

Capital Punishment Issues

The inconsistency and discrimination issues related to capital punishment are that, first, it is unevenly applied to all persons and, second, it is more commonly supported by Whites than it is by African-Americans (Unnever, Cullen, 2007). The concept that criminal justice and capital punishment are a good fit for one another is not a concept that African-Americans tend to promote; yet the underlying cause of their lack of support is rooted in their view of the criminal justice system itself -- which is generally regarded among them as being more unjust than just, especially with respect to African-American lives. For Whites, on the other hand, capital punishment is viewed as a legitimate form of punishment within the system -- one that works and one that should be doled out to those who deserve in order to maintain society's integrity.

Yet, the problem of capital punishment is that it tends to be unevenly distributed among convicts -- or, at least, the African-American community feels that it is targeted more than other communities -- namely, White ones (Unnever, Cullen, 2007). The inconsistency with which it is given as a punishment, moreover, does not even need to be assessed in racial terms -- it can be assessed in terms of the crime committed. In some cases, the criminals who commit the same crime and given different punishments and it largely depends upon how the case plays out, the judge, the defendant, and so on. Consistency in the criminal justice system is not a strong suit. As for discrimination, this is felt most strongly among the African-American community, which is not surprising considering its high ratio of members of its community who are arrested and imprisoned by adulthood.

I think that the main issues of disparity and discrimination in applying the death penalty are fundamentally related to this country's history and inherent racist attitudes that stem from the WASP origins of the nation's Founding Fathers. The elites who essentially founded the country and its ruling ideological basis were essentially all White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs -- and their view of themselves and the rest of the world was much like the way the Jews view themselves as God's chosen people. For instance, the early Americans felt that it was their Manifest Destiny to take over the lands of the New World and exterminate anyone or any races that got in their way. Thus, the war against the Native Americans and the subsequent genocide against them took place throughout the 17th and 18th centuries -- and the Mexicans were pushed out of the area that became Texas -- which the U.S. essentially stole. And the African-Americans were used as slave past the midpoint of the 19th century -- and were only freed as a result of Lincoln having has back against the wall during the Civil War.