A killing machine fueled by racism
Gov. Jeff Landry wants to start executing death row inmates again
How is it that anti-government conservatives who can’t trust the US Postal Service to deliver the mail believe that the government is competent to adjudicate the taking of a human life?
And how is it that evangelical Christians and supposedly devout Catholics — who consider themselves pro-life — are so eager to entrust government bureaucrats with the power to kill another human being?
The animating principle of many conservative Christians isn’t a profound respect for life but a bloodthirsty desire for government-enforced extermination.
It’s been 14 years since Louisiana executed anyone on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Fifty-seven people reside on Louisiana’s death row. Before he left office, former Gov. John Bel Edwards tried to commute the sentences of 56 of them to life without parole. Then-Attorney General Jeff Landry thwarted Edwards’ efforts to force the state’s Pardon and Parole Board to act.
Landry did so because he wanted the pleasure and political benefit of slaughtering those individuals. “Look, this is ridiculous,” Landry said in a radio interview last June. “We haven’t executed anyone since 2010. All of the states around us are holding executions and doing a lot better in the crime metrics than Louisiana.”
Louisiana is not an outlier in our region, and there’s no evidence that the death penalty has any impact on a state’s crime rate. The states that impose the death penalty generally have the highest murder rates.
As governor, Landry will now take pleasure in putting Louisiana back in the business of killing humans, especially after Alabama “successfully” experimented with a new process for killing people.
Last week, Alabama officials tortured 58-year-old convicted killer Kenneth Eugene Smith to death by nitrogen hypoxia. According to the Associated Press, “Breathing through a nitrogen-filled face mask that deprived him of oxygen . . . Smith convulsed in seizure-like spasms for at least two minutes of the 22-minute execution by nitrogen hypoxia Thursday. The force of his movements at times caused the gurney to visibly shake. That was followed by several minutes of gasping breathing until his breath was no longer perceptible.”
Afterward, Landry developed a strong case of butcher envy. As the Baton Rouge Advocate’s James Finn reported:
Gov. Jeff Landry will push lawmakers next month to expand methods the state can use to carry out the death penalty, sources say, as Landry seeks to restart executions following more than a decade in which Louisiana’s death chamber sat unused.
Landry, a Republican, has long voiced support for resuming executions through means other than lethal injection drugs, which are in short supply nationwide. He will call on the Legislature to expand those methods in a special session slated to start in late February, according to four people familiar with Landry’s goals for the session.
Let’s set aside, for now, the “cruel and unusual” nature of the death penalty, especially as applied in Alabama. We could also discuss the official Catechism of the Catholic Church on the death penalty. Landry’s church calls it “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and deems it “inadmissible” in all cases. There’s also a considerable number of people on death row put there because of incompetent or inadequate legal representation. Save all that for another time.
A racist killing machine
Today, let us examine how Landry wants to fire up a killing machine fueled by racism with a reputation for often convicting the wrong person.
Consider first how often Louisiana juries convict the wrong person (which is, no doubt, often connected to the race of the defendant).
In a 2016 article in The Southern University Law Center Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, researchers Tim Lyman and Frank R. Baumgartner reported on the imperfect way Louisiana juries and judges have applied the death penalty:
Since 1976, Louisiana’s experience with capital punishment has been deeply dysfunctional, with a significantly higher case reversal rate than the national average, and marked disparities in sentencing, reversals, and executions depending on the race and gender of the victim and accused.
Since 2000, Louisiana has seen 50 reversals of previous death sentences, including seven exonerations, and only two executions. Not only are these reversal rates extremely high, but the racial discrepancies are shocking as well. . . .
Lyman and Baumgartner reported another discovery that should give everyone reading this an urge to stop and contemplate its implications for at least five minutes before you continue reading:
No white person has been executed in Louisiana for a crime against a black victim since 1752. [emphasis mine]
Capital punishment nationwide, but particularly in Southern states like Louisiana, is profoundly racist.
In 2020, Lyman, Baumgartner, and Glenn L. Pierce published a follow-up article on the death penalty in Louisiana, again in The Southern University Law Center Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty.
This time, they examined the cases of the 28 male prisoners executed in Louisiana between 1972 and 2010. (The last inmate executed in Louisiana was Gerald Bordelon in 2010, put to death after he dropped his appeals.)
The researchers found:
Regardless of the race of the defendant, 24 of the 28 cases resulting in execution involved white victims (85.7%). . . . Nine blacks were put to death for killing white victims and no whites were executed for killing black victims. In 20 of the 28 cases (71.4%), the executed prisoner was convicted of killing at least one female. Women or girls constituted only 19% of homicide victims in Louisiana from 1976 through 2011, so the fact that 71.4% of those executed had female victims shows that such crimes are substantially over-represented in execution cases.
In other words, if you’re convicted of killing a White person or woman in Louisiana, a jury is much more likely to sentence you to death.
Louisiana, as the researchers noted, also has a terrible record of handing out capital punishment to innocent Black men:
11 men sentenced to death in Louisiana since 1972 were later vindicated when new evidence emerged that supported their innocence claims. Eight of these defendants (72.7%) were black.
Louisiana ranks fourth among the states – behind only Florida, Illinois, and Texas (much larger states) — in the number of people sentenced to death since 1972 who were released because evidence emerged that they were not guilty.
In Louisiana, no scenario seems more likely to get a defendant the death penalty than being convicted of killing a White person.
“While the defendant’s race was not by itself a statistically significant predictor of who was sentenced to death,” the researchers found, “the victim’s race was; 21.4% of the cases with white victims resulted in death, compared with 8.1% of those with black victims.”
In other words, Louisiana (and across the country) juries not only value Black lives less when considering the fate of a defendant, but they also value White lives more when considering the worth of a victim.
Executions Nationwide Since 1976:
After examining all 241 death sentences handed out in Louisiana between 1972 and 2015, the researchers concluded, “Notwithstanding the race of the defendant, those convicted of killing whites were more than six times more likely to receive a death penalty than those convicted of killing blacks, and 14 times more likely to be executed.”
One reason juries are so eager to kill Black defendants for killing a white person is that jurors in capital cases are seated based on their willingness to apply the death penalty. As the ACLU explains:
To serve on a death penalty jury, potential jurors must declare to prosecutors that they are willing to impose the death penalty. This assertion makes them — “death qualified.” Death qualification is as sinister as it sounds, and it’s demonstrably racist.
Disproportionate numbers of Black jurors and jurors of faith, especially Catholics, are excluded from death penalty juries. Combined with the prosecutor’s use of peremptory strikes — or removing jurors without providing a reason — death penalty juries end up being overwhelmingly white, male, and biased in favor of the prosecution and death. We should note that even though the Constitution forbids using peremptory strikes to remove jurors based on their race, prosecutors frequently do so anyway by using various evasive tactics.
I’m all for talking about the immoral nature of state-sanctioned killing. I’d love to see more discussion about how the death penalty is an ineffective method for fighting crime. And I’d be pleased to see more people learn about how many people on death row have intellectual disabilities or mental illnesses.
But none of that should shock our consciences more than the appalling and racist application of the death penalty in Louisiana.
Any governor with a conscience would want to do whatever is necessary to “reform” it or end it, not find more creative (and presumably enjoyable) ways to kill people.
I’d love to take our new governor to Montgomery, Ala., to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It’s a profoundly moving experience. The museum tells the powerful story of the destructive racial violence that shaped our nation — from the slave trade to Jim Crow to lynching to the current mass incarceration crisis.
What Landry would learn – and what he would see – if he took time to visit the Montgomery museum is that there’s a straight, unmistakable line from slavery through Jim Crown through lynching that leads right to the death chamber at Angola.
To quote lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Legacy Museum, “capital punishment is the stepchild of lynching.”
Harry Connick Sr. exemplified the racism embedded in Louisiana's 'justice' system
One reason so many innocent people have been sent to Louisiana’s death row over the decades is because of prosecutors like Harry Connick, Sr., who served five terms as Orleans Parish district attorney.
Connick died last week at age 97. As Adam Nossiter of the New York Times wrote:
[Connick’s] national reputation as a district attorney was much darker, particularly after a 2011 dissent by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that blasted the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office, under his leadership, for singular incompetence and misconduct.
Justice Ginsburg found that Mr. Connick’s subordinates systematically hid evidence that could aid the defense, in violation of the Constitution. . . .
Louisiana has routinely had one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office bears much of the responsibility.
According to the Innocence Project of New Orleans, which works to free the wrongfully convicted, 32 of those convicted during Mr. Connick’s time in office, from 1973 to 2003, were “factually innocent” and later exonerated. In 27 of those cases there was prosecutorial misconduct by Mr. Connick’s assistants, the group’s director, Jee Park, said in an email.
New Orleans under Mr. Connick had “the highest known wrongful conviction rate in the world,” Ms. Park said. “I do not know of any other former or current district attorney in the country with such a devastating record.”
Race was at the heart of it. An overwhelming majority of those wrongfully convicted by Mr. Connick’s office, 96 percent, were Black, according to the Innocence Project.
“Christ in Alabama,” by Langston Hughes
According to historian Lilian Calles Barger, writing in the U.S. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY BLOG:
Langston Hughes wrote his poem “Christ in Alabama” in 1931, in response to the Scottsboro Boys trial. In forty-seven words and thirteen pared-down lines, the poem captures two hundred years of racist injustice. It depicts Christ as a black Jew, the bastard son of a black “mammy” and a white father “God.” The black Christ has been a constant theme of African American religion, along with the motif of the Exodus and final overcoming. It’s a familiar one, too, in black political thought, from Countee Cullen’s 1922 poem “Christ Recrucified” to Albert Cleage’s The Black Messiah (1968). Hughes’ poem is in this tradition and portrays a religion that legitimizes white power and teaches African Americans to loathe themselves. It is a stark depiction of the racism in which American religion is embroiled.
Many white Christians found Hughes’ poem troubling. His reading of it at the University of North Carolina to a mostly white audience nearly incited a riot. For one audience member, it was “bad enough to call Christ a bastard but to call Him a nigger—that’s too much.” For theologian James Cone, however, confronting religion’s role in perpetuating American racism was precisely what was necessary. One might say “Christ in Alabama” presents a capsule statement of Cone’s theological project. As did Hughes’ poem, the black theology of James Cone brought the issues of race, gender, and politics to religion as a way to imagine new forms of solidarity among Americans.
Powerful! As we have moved forward in the last decade, this 2024 has stepped us back 50 years, which seems out of step with the majority of random people I have discussed this issue with, some I know well and some just aquaitances. Some are from Louisiana and others from different states.
So what is wrong with this picture?