Gabbidon, S. L., & Greene, H. T. (2016). Race and Crime (Fourth ed.). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
In all the industrialized nations, America remains one of the few that use the death penalty. European nations such as Italy (1944), Britain (1969), Spain (1978), and France (1981) have abolished the death penalty (Zimring, 2003). Zimring tries to answer the question of why it is still used in America by analyzing executions by region, finding similarities between current patterns of death penalty and historical lynching trends. Data shows that from 1889-1918, lynchings (88%) and state sanctioned executions (56%) predominantly carried out in the South. Zimring (2003) concluded that the South has a “culture of punishment.” This culture in the South has been repeatedly substituted from lynchings in the nineteenth century to the death penalty today.
This source is useful to the topic of the death penalty because it shows the historical statistics from different regions in the United States. The death penalty today is comparable to executions back then and it is relevant because the percentages have stayed alike. The source is reliable as Frank Zimring used regional percentages from the Death Penalty Information Center and deducted his logical arguments solely off of those statistics. The goal of the source is to point out the similarities throughout the past few centuries of punishment carried out by the governmental system.
This source was helpful to me because it was in the textbook chapter that covered my topic and showed reliable statistics that helped prove Zimring’s point. This shaped my argument that the death penalty has just evolved from older executions. It changed how I thought about this topic because I was unaware of the history of punishment in the South.
Baumgartner, F. R., Johnson, E., Wilson, C., & Whitehead, C. (2016). These Lives Matter, Those Ones Don’t: Comparing Execution Rates by the Race and Gender of the Victim in the U.S. And in the Top Death Penalty States. Albany Law Review, 79(3), 797–860.
This source compares the execution rates by the race and gender of the victim in the United States. For example, killers of white female victims are more than ten times more likely to be executed by the state than are the killers of black males. Trends also show that capital punishment values white victims more regardless of the race of the perpetrator. Among white inmates, 90% of all victims are also white. However, among black inmates, a majority of their victims are white.
This source is useful because it further covers the execution rates by race and gender. It is evident that certain lives are treated as if they are more equal than others when comparing homicide victimization with execution cases. Statistics on homicide offender-victim combinations come from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports matching homicide offenders with victims. This review also includes dozens of charts and graphs detailing the gender and race of victims nationwide and a deeper analysis into active capital punishment states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia.
This fits into my part of the research of analyzing the historical trends of who is typically a victim of the death penalty in the United States. Although it is known that there are immense racial and gender disparities in the use of the death penalty, statistics from a scholarly source truly show the magnitude of it. It has added to my knowledge of the topic by using visual graphs to interpret how race and gender factor into the death penalty.
Steiker, C. S., & Steiker, J. M. (2015). The American Death Penalty and the (In)Visibility of Race. University of Chicago Law Review, 82(1), 243–294.
This source highlights the fact that there was never a time in American history where the death penalty was not used racially. Since the founding of the United States, capital punishment has been an embedded practice that is explicitly mentioned multiple times in the Constitution. Since colonial times, blacks not only received the death penalty more often than whites, but also were punished for different crimes and subject to more extreme forms of execution. The Supreme Court constantly avoided direct mention of the issue of discrimination in capital punishment cases despite it being a major racial significance throughout American history.
This source is extremely suitable because it goes in depth of the history of punishment back to colonial times. This source is comparable to my other sources detailing the prevalence of capital punishment in the South but is different because it covers other entities such as the NAACP and the Supreme Court. This information is scholarly and does not appear to have any implicit biases. The goal of the source is to investigate the Supreme Court's tactic of avoiding race and show the consequences of a race-neutral approach.
This is applicable to my research because it deals with the death penalty and the visibility of race. This source was helpful because I learned of the history of Supreme Court cases that dealt with race and segregation and how different justices decided on the matters. It was interesting to learn of how the highest court ignored any racial involvement in the carrying out of the death penalty and is something that is underreported by the corporate media.