Racial Disparity in Criminal Justice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Racial Disparity in Criminal Justice - Essay Example Death penalty or execution is the most severe sentence that the United States and other countries use particularly for rape and murder cases. Military laws and federal states have also bestowed capital punishment for other crimes like espionage, treason, kidnapping, desertion from military service and robbery. The fact that state prisons are full of a disparate number of inmates who are people of color and who are on death row is a clear indication of racial disparity in sentencing. In other words, today’s capital punishment is a system that vents the anger of society over crime crisis on a select group. As far as death penalty is concerned, the contagious existence of racism has not slackened with time and this crisis is not confined in one area. One of the possible causes for this abiding problem is that the juries who make the critical decisions on death penalty in the United States are almost exclusively white. An empirical study at Law School in St. Mary's University indi cates that in the U.S, there is only one percent African-American District Attorneys in counties that use the death penalty while the other chief District Attorneys are white with a percentage of almost ninety-eight.