The ‘stepchild of lynching’: How the death penalty targets Black people

From [HERE] In 1904, a violent mob set upon the jail in the city of Huntsville, Alabama, occupying the first floor and demanding the jailors release Horace Maples, a Black man accused of killing an elderly white farmer named John Waldrop. When police refused, the crowd set fire to the jail to smoke him out.

Armed men kept the fire department from putting out the blaze. A sheriff eventually made Maples jump out of the second-floor window into the throng of people below, estimated to be about 2,000 people strong. The lynch mob soon had a rope around Maples’s neck, and dragged him onto the county courthouse lawn.

Waldrop’s son confronted the panicked man. Maples admitted to the murder, though it’s hard to imagine a confession more forced. He was strung over a nearby tree. The crowd filled his body with bullets, then took his fingers and clothing as souvenirs.

Seven alleged members of the mob later went on trial, and all were acquitted.

A year after Horace Maples was lynched, the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy installed a monument to Confederate soldiers in front of the courthouse, a reminder of just what justice meant in Huntsville for a Black man in 1904. It was replaced in the 1960s with a replica, during the height of the civil rights movement.

Lynchings may no longer terrorise the South in such great numbers, but America has never stopped feeding Black people through a system of rough justice that often uses public, exceptional violence to end their lives.

In the present day, the death penalty singles out people of colour by virtually every measure. More than just a passing similarity, though, the history of capital punishment in the US is tightly bound up with the rope and tree. Both are among America’s “peculiar” institutions.

Black people are vastly over-represented on death row. The US Black population is about 13 per cent in America, according to census data, while death row’s Black population was almost triple that, as of this spring. Those who kill white people are 17 times more likely to get the death penalty than those who kill Black people, according to a landmark 2020 study. Meanwhile, people of colour made up 63.8 per cent of modern wrongful death sentences, according to one analysis.

Beginning with the first executions that occurred in British colonies in North America to the present, capital punishment has always been applied unevenly, according to Elisabeth Semel, a law professor who heads University of California Berkeley’s Death Penalty Clinic.

“From its inception, in this country, the death penalty and racism were inseparable,” she told The Independent. “That history is defining. It just is defining.”

Disparities are found in nearly every facet of the process, in every location in the country that still practices the death penalty, she added: who gets accused of capital crimes; who gets good legal representation; who gets sentenced to death; and who is able to appeal the epidemic of wrongful convictions. Juan Melendez, 70, believes racism played a major role in sending him to Florida’s death row for a murder he didn’t commit. He was imprisoned for 17 years before being exonerated in 2002, after it was shown prosecutors witheld exculpatory evidence of another man confessing.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in his family’s native Puerto Rico, Juan went back to the US looking for adventure and opportunity when he turned 18 and went to work in American fruit fields on an agricultural visa programme.

“I was one of them looking for an American dream, and it turned out to be an American nightmare,” he said.