The claim that America disproportionately executes blacks is a falsehood, disseminated on virtually every left-wing website, from the ACLU’s to all the anti-death-penalty sites. The only way it can be regarded as true is if the disproportion is in relation to the entire population of the country: Blacks make up about 12 percent of the population, and since 1976 about 35 percent of those executed for murder have been black. But this is a statistic that tells no truth because it is meaningless in terms of determining alleged racial bias.
This is very easy to prove. Males make up about 50 percent of the American population but about 99 percent of those executed. Is the American justice system wildly anti-male?
Of course not. The statistic that matters in assessing bias in executions is the proportion of murderers of a given group that is executed, not the group’s proportion of the entire population.
And, here, it is clear that blacks are actually underrepresented in executions.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death-penalty organization, between 1976 and January 2012, 441 blacks (35 percent of the total of convicted murderers) and 717 whites (55 percent of the total) were executed. Given that blacks committed more than half the murders during that time (52 percent vs. 46 percent by whites), if we are to assess racial bias based on proportionality of murderers executed, the system is biased against whites, not blacks.
It's truly a ridiculous claim that is so simplistic, it makes one wonder if Paul really knows the truth and is simply trying to court a certain voting bloc. For someone who has devoted many years to studying the complexities of Austrian economics, it really makes you wonder...
No comments:
Post a Comment