'The death penalty is a form of violence committed through America's court system against poor, non-white people.' [MORE] Racism/white supremacy is carried out through violence and/or deception. [MORE] 

From [HERE] and [HERE] A Texas appeals court Wednesday rejected an appeal to overturn a death sentence for a convicted Black man whose lawyers argued the sentence was the result of racial discrimination. The majority of the state's highest criminal court, six judges, issued an unsigned opinion, dismissing the appeal outright without any elucidation beyond stating that it failed to meet the criteria set out in statute for the consideration of a subsequent writ.

Duane Buck, a 50 yr old Black man, was sentenced to die for the 1995 murder of his girlfriend and one of her friends. 

He does not deny his guilt in these terrible crimes and neither Buck's attorneys nor prosecutors dispute his conviction for the double-murder - so there is no question that he must be punished.  Nevertheless, he must have a fair sentence - free from unconstitutional factors such as race. His attorneys have argued that racial considerations factored into the sentencing phase of his trial.

During the presentation of evidence at the penalty phase of Mr. Buck’s trial — when the jury was required to decide between the death penalty and a life sentence — the trial prosecutor elicited testimony from psychologist Walter Quijano (defense witness) indicating that Mr. Buck’s race made him more likely to be violent in the future.

The prosecutor asked, “You have determined that the sex factor, that a male is more violent than a female because that’s just the way it is, and that the race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons; is that correct?”

“Yes,” the psychologist, Walter Quijano, answered.

Because a finding of future dangerousness is a prerequisite for a death sentence in Texas, the prosecutor then argued in closing that the jury should rely on that race-based expert testimony to find that Mr. Buck would pose a future danger. The jury accepted the prosecutor’s recommendation, and Mr. Buck was sentenced to death.

Shockingly, Mr. Buck’s was not the only case in which Texas relied on this false and offensive link between race and dangerousness to secure a death sentence. In 2000, John Cornyn, the Texas attorney general at the time and now a United States senator, identified six cases where prosecutors relied on the same expert’s race-based prediction — testifying three times for the prosecution and three times for the defense — to send African-American and Latino men to death row. In an attempt to restore integrity to the state’s criminal-justice system, Mr. Cornyn, a Republican, acknowledged then that Texas’ exploitation of racial fears and stereotypes was unconstitutional and he promised that all six men — including Mr. Buck — would be given new sentencing hearings free of racial discrimination.

Texas kept its promise in five of the six cases, but for no discernible reason it has reversed course and pursued Mr. Buck’s execution.

As outrageous as it is, the prosecutor’s appeal to racial prejudice is not the only evidence showing that race played a role in Mr. Buck’s death sentence. A recently released study by the University of Maryland statistician Ray Paternoster shows that at the time of Mr. Buck’s trial, the Harris County district attorney’s office was over three times more likely to seek the death penalty against African-American defendants like Mr. Buck than against similarly situated whites, and Harris County juries were twice as likely to impose death sentences on African-Americans like Mr. Buck. Thus, it is abundantly clear that in Mr. Buck’s case, racial fears and prejudices supplanted reliable evidence in the assessment of proper punishment. [MORE]

This morning, however, the majority of the CCA declined to address the issue at all, dismissing the appeal without any discussion of the as-yet-unresolved issue. [MORE]

The Supreme Court intervened just hours before Buck's execution on September 15, 2011, with justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan arguing that the case needed to be reviewed because "our criminal justice system should not tolerate (a death sentence) marred by racial overtones."

But despite an outcry from some politicians, religious leaders, and judges calling for a new hearing, the nine justice-panel at Texas' highest criminal court rejected Buck's appeal.

"We are gravely disappointed," Buck's lawyers, Kate Black and Christina Swarns, said in a statement.

They said they will bring the case to the Supreme Court "and we are hopeful that the Supreme Court will intervene to right this unequivocal wrong."

The lawyers cited three dissenting judges as saying the "record in this case reveals a chronicle of inadequate representation at every stage of the proceedings, the integrity of which is further called into question by the admission of racist and inflammatory testimony from an expert witness at the punishment stage."

The lawyers had filed their appeal in March for the death sentence to be overturned and a new hearing be held because of a "long history of racial discrimination" in the administration of criminal justice in Harris County, Texas.

They cited a study which concluded that from 1992 to 1999 -- the period during which Buck was tried and sentenced -- prosecutors in Harris County were "over three times more likely to seek the death penalty against African American defendants, than against similarly-situated white defendants."

The study also found that juries in Harris County were more than twice as likely to impose death sentences on African American defendants than on whites. The study also found evidence that race played a role in Buck's particular case.