[np422]

I recall the ted talk http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo..., if a black man is found guilty of murdering a white woman in Alabama, he is 400 times more likely to be sentenced to death compared to a white man found guilty of murdering a black woman.

I sometimes think about what the reaction would be if statistics showed that the German courts disproportionately often decided to sentence Jews to death?

Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system in the United States?

[hnpc123]

I looked through the transcript of that talk and could not find a reference to that statistic.

I was prompted to actually look into this claim because the incidence of white-on-black murder is extremely low and I imagine the incidence of white-on-black murder where the victim is a woman is even lower. I would be surprised if there were even 5 such cases in the past 50 years in Alabama.

Do you have any sources? Or can you post the relevant snippet from that talk?

[jkyle]

Black on white murder is also extremely low.

~84% of white victims are murdered by whites and ~90% of black victims are murdered by blacks.[1]

Crime is primarily a function of opportunity. When opportunity is taken into account, the main reason for the discrepancy is blacks are simply more likely to come into contact with whites day to day than the reverse.

So while I can't confirm the above statistic for you I can refute the assumption that there is a significant discrepancy between white-on-black crime vs. black-on-white crime.

1. http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2015/may/21/update...

[hnpc123]

If blacks are more likely to come into contact with whites than the reverse then it would follow that blacks are more likely to be killed by whites than whites are by blacks.

[jkyle]

Yes it does, but that skew is very small. Only a few percentage points...as cited above.

It would be a mischaracterization to imply one is extremely low, while the other is much higher. They are both, comparably, very low.

[hnpc123]

For exactly the reason you stated the rate of black-on-white murder is much higher than the reverse.

[jkyle]

I do not think most would consider 5 or 6% is "much higher" or that if 90% is "extremely low" that 84% is not also "extremely low".

Particularly when you take variance and margin of error into account.

With such a tight range, I would wager one could only definitely claim they were probably approximately within a percent or two at best.

[tzs]

> Crime is primarily a function of opportunity. When opportunity is taken into account, the main reason for the discrepancy is blacks are simply more likely to come into contact with whites day to day than the reverse.

Crime is primarily a function of opportunity in environments prone to crime. In environments not prone to crime it is primarily a function of motivated offenders, and most opportunities are not taken advantage of.

[tzs]

That's a pretty big difference. However, before ascribing it all or mostly to race, it would really be necessary to look at the individual cases.

In general, murders where it is a lower class person murdering an upper class person in furtherance of a robbery or some such draw more vigorous prosecution and are more likely to get a death penalty than murders where it is some lower class person killing some other lower class person.

Since blacks have disproportionately high representation in the lower classes, and whites disproportionately high representation in the upper classes, black murderer/white victim is disproportionately represented among the death penalty attracting lower class on upper class murders.

[erikpukinskis]

I appreciate that you are being careful about the possibility of a latent variable here. I don't have any data about poor-on-rich/rich-on-poor accusations and conviction rates, so I can't speak directly to that.

However, the general conviction rate for "high class" black men is higher than the rate for "low class" white men: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the... I can't see any reason why I shouldn't assume the same applies to interracial murders as well.

I do appreciate your point, and perhaps it is time for a civil rights movement among the poor, or among the white poor. I would support that. We should at least be getting the data.

But since we have this data about black people specifically, it seems fine to try to solve that problem from a race-based perspective. As other data rolls in that shows there are similar problems for the white poor, then I think we should try to solve that problem too.

Saying we shouldn't try to fix this problem because new data might come along that shows it part of a bigger problem is, to me, "great is the enemy of good" thinking.

[theklub]

You're not factoring in lawyers. They make a big difference. It has more to do with money and less to do with race.

[anigbrowl]

And yet race predicts economic disparities quite well, so while access to lawyers may be a second-order effect of racism it is nonetheless a real one.

Now I certainly don't suggest that race is the only factor here. The USA is a very classist society, not least due to a residual Calvinism that equates earthly wealth with a sign of God's favor and thus some inherent moral superiority, a view which seems to have been implicitly incorporated into the platform of one major political party.

[damagedcake]

So much wrong with this statement it's hard to even know where to start.

[anigbrowl]

Perhaps you could begin by identifying which of the various statements I made you found disagreeable. If you can't be bothered to make even a minimal effort, why should I care what you think?

[rhino369]

There are too many poor whites for the impact of lawyers to be that bad.

But the number of death sentences in Alabama isn't large. ~250 since 1980. The percentage of murders that are white on black is about 3% of all murders. And white men murder women about 30% of time they commit murder. So we are talking about probably 1-2% of all murders are white male on black female.

So you'd only expect 2-5 white people on death row in Alabama for murdering a black woman. That is way way way too small of a sample size to make bold claims on.

Though, I'm pretty damn sure racism has an impact on sentencing.

[jacquesm]

> But the number of death sentences in Alabama isn't large. ~250 since 1980.

That's HUGE.

[monknomo]

I'm fairly certain that even if you control for income and education, black people are still treated more harshly by the justice system.

I won't venture to guess whether there are regional differences as well...

[sharkweek]

Money and race are certainly not independent of one another in a lot of cases in the US

[jessaustin]

Yes they work together to help us ignore the serious problems we have with both. "Oh, the fact that cops beat up poor blacks is because they're poor, not black, so it's OK!" "The terrible public schools that the poor have to use don't seem so bad when you control for race!"

[np422]

Even if income could explain the whole difference it would still not be a very agreeable explanation.

Even though it's a naive idea, I still think that everyone should be entitled to the same level of legal support in a criminal case regardless of your socio-economic status.

[VLM]

As helpful as that sounds, it still wouldn't help earlier in the pipeline effects such as policing (a fighting kid in a white school is just a fighting kid who gets de-escalated and a note sent home, a fighting kid in a black school is arrested automatically). Or another difficult early pipeline area is prosecution and plea bargains being racially different (the white kid gets a plea offer for municipal loitering, the black kid gets prosecuted for misdemeanor possession of burglary tools).

Explosive growth in income inequality makes the debate meaningless. There won't be grades of legal support, they'll just be billionaires who above the system and dirt poor peasants who get no support at all. Now (or recently) is probably not a good cultural era to go into the defense attorney field, for example. Being a defense attorney in an era where no one needs or can afford a defense attorney is like being a really great star trek warp field engineer in 2015, thats nice but how do you pay your bills?

[anigbrowl]

That's why I dropped out of law school. I went to a large-ish legal conference and realized how utterly hopeless the odds were, and decided to cut my losses. I'm not proud of it but my mental health is too fragile for me to function effectively under those conditions, which makes me worse than useless as an advocate for anyone else.

[CWuestefeld]

That's simply not possible. And I don't mean it's impractical, I mean that the laws of mathematics won't allow it.

Legal support is a finite resource. There are only so many lawyers (thank god!) and of those that exist, some lawyers are better than others. It's simply not possible to give everyone the exact same quality of representation, short of ensuring that everyone has zero.

This is just one example of what the price system does in the market. The whole point is that resources are scarce, and the means of indicating how important a resource is for some purpose, is by voting with your money. And it's turtles all the way down: what gives you that money to indicate the importance of the scarce resource, is that you're providing some scarce resource to other people, who are paying you, and they are doing the same, and so on...

[BurningFrog]

Agreeable or not, understanding reality is needed to know what, if any, problems need solving.

If you assume the problem is racism, while in reality it's income, your earnest efforts to combat racism will be do nothing (at best) to solve it.

[CapitalistCartr]

One could write an algorithm to accurately predict application of the death penalty here in Florida just by factoring skin darkness, wealth, IQ, sex, and age. The particulars of the case beyond that don't matter.

[duaneb]

> Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system in the United States?

So many. But most of all, the attitude about what the hell prison is for needs to change. Many people embrace the death penalty in spite of increased costs, and support high sentences despite a low rate of successful rehabilitation. We need to care about our prisoners and vote for them for change to happen.

It's not that people aren't aware of it, it's a matter of priorities. There's a reason Trump is emphasizing immigration changes.