Free Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Page B

a beloved schoolteacher who was the mother of three young children, and a lesser sentence if the person killed was a crack-addicted drug dealer. On the face of it, race plays no part in these judgments, but because wealth, power, and status in the United States are still so unevenly distributed along racial lines, there would inevitably be a race effect, even if we were all color-blind. Furthermore, it is also fair to note that in a city like Chicago about half of murders are gang-related. Race is obviously part of the picture when we talk about gangs, but it is also significant in deciding whether capital punishment is appropriate in a given case that the victim, in messing with gangs, voluntarily placed himself in harm’s way.
    These factors palliate the systemic disparity, but do not seem to fully explain it. The numbers still demonstrate that race and the death penalty are linked, and suggest that the many decision-makers in the capital system—cops, prosecutors, and juries—may value white lives more highly than black ones. When the capital sentencing system places the murder of a white in the gravest classes of offenses 350 percent more often than it does the killing of a black, we are exposing potent issues, especially whether we are really punishing like crimes alike.
    Examination of other variables tends to reinforce the impression that we are not. Geography, as I mentioned, also matters in Illinois. You are five times more likely to get a death sentence for first-degree murder in a rural area than would be the case in Cook County, which includes Chicago. Gender seems to count, too. Capital punishment for slaying a woman has been imposed at three and a half times the rate for murdering a man, while women are sentenced to death only 60 percent as frequently. The fact that variables like the race and gender of the victim and the location of the murder all impact on who gets the death penalty tends to call into question the notion that capital punishment vindicates a uniform or broadly shared morality, as opposed to a network of less admirable prejudices and preconceptions.
    And variations related to race, locale, and gender do not take any account of the highly individualized factors that can influence the judgment of those who make the death penalty decision. The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have debated whether the constitutional demand for consistent and reasoned imposition of capital punishment can ever be reconciled with the competing requirement that individual cases must be decided on their own peculiar facts. But the elements at play are not always limited to what aggravates or mitigates a particular matter. In one death row case with which I became familiar, defense lawyers insisted that the trial prosecutor elected capital punishment because he was leaving the State’s Attorney’s Office and had never tried a death penalty case. There was some circumstantial corroboration for the claim, but even if the desire for experience had only an unconscious role in the prosecutor’s decision-making, it serves to emphasize how haphazard the determinative elements can be in who lives and who dies.
    There are also paradoxical effects in the way sentences ultimately get carried out. Cases are sifted by the justice apparatus at widely varying rates. The tiny percentage of death row inmates who have actually been executed have been selected for that fate based on largely adventitious factors including the art of the lawyers who’ve represented them in post-conviction proceedings, the backlog in particular judicial systems, and the demonstrated ineffectiveness of their original lawyers. The worse the job done by the trial lawyers, both prosecutors and defense counsel, the longer condemned prisoners live, no matter how grave their crime or potent the evidence.
    Standing back from it all, I found it hard to discern the guiding hand of reason. Adding these factors together—race, gender,