Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 26, 1994 TAG: 9405260077
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Knight Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
When it comes to crime-fighting, there are few shades of gray in the fierce election-year crime debate that's under way in Congress.
In the battle over the so-called Racial Justice Act, black and white are given new significance. The act's proponents want to allow skin color to play a part in determining the toughest punishment of all: death.
The act would allow convicted murderers and others appealing death warrants to raise claims of racial bias in prosecution and sentencing. Statistical evidence of disparate sentencing in death cases throughout the judicial circuit or state could be employed.
By the slimmest of margins, the House adopted the act as an amendment to its version of the omnibus anti-crime bill, largely at the insistence of the Congressional Black Caucus.
"There is no check on the prosecutor today. He chooses blacks for death. Allowing the defendant to try to show that that is the case is the only check on him," Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's delegate in the House, said during floor debate. "Do not turn your backs on documented racism in the application of the death penalty."
The Senate not only rejected the proposal, but also voted 58-41 on May 11 to instruct its negotiators to make sure the act is left out of the final version of the crime bill to be written in an upcoming House-Senate conference. One objection is that the House's provision would be retroactive in all death-penalty cases.
The dispute is crucial to the 36 states that use the death penalty. (Kansas joins them on July 1.) Thirty state attorneys general signed a letter this month opposing the act.
"We feel pretty strongly that justice should be individual, based on the peculiar circumstances of each case, not subject to a statistical analysis of the other cases in that jurisdiction," said Florida's deputy attorney general, Pete Antonacci. Ideally, he said, prosecutors and judges should be "colorblind" in making decisions. Florida has 341 people on its death row, of whom 125 are black.
Steve Goldstein, an associate dean at Florida State University's law school who handles death-penalty appeals, makes the counterargument.
"If someone can prove that 90 percent of the applicants for jobs were black but only 5 percent of those who got hired were black, the law in this country requires the employer to prove that their hiring decisions were not racially based. ... Basically, what the Racial Justice Act is trying to do is to take that same principle and make it equally applicable in this context," he said.
If a pattern of discrimination can be suggested, state prosecutors would have to prove race was not a factor in their actions, especially the initial decision of whether to seek the death penalty.
The act aims to reverse a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case from Georgia that rejected a claim of bias based on an extensive statistical analysis. The study found differences in sentencing based on the race of the
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