Most of the discussion about the death penalty in Missouri has centered on the state’s lethal injection drugs. When the state resumed executions in late 2013, it did so with the use of drugs acquired from a secret compounding pharmacy, not regulated by the FDA. Yesterday, a Circuit Judge in Cole County ruled that the Department of Corrections broke the law by refusing to publicly identify its drug supplier. State law grants anonymity to members of the team that carries out executions, but the judge said it was unreasonable for the state to classify the pharmacy as part of its execution team.
And while this fight for transparency has received quite a bit of local and even national attention from the media, deeper structural issues with the capital punishment system here have gone largely ignored. A study published yesterday by Frank Baumgartner, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, documents ways in which race and geography impact whether a person convicted of a homicide will face the death penalty. In the study, Baumgartner looked at the 80 executions carried out in the state between 1976 and 2014.
See Also: How We Kill, our award-winning examination of the death penalty in Missouri.
He found that homicides involving a white victim are seven times more likely to result in an execution than killings in which the victim is black. To be specific, 2.16 percent of homicides with a white victim lead to an execution, compared to just 0.3 percent of those with a black victim. Further, homicides involving white female victims are 14 times more likely to result in an execution than those involving black male victims. And though white people account for just 40 percent of all murder victims, 81 percent of executions in Missouri involve a white victim.
Perhaps most remarkable, only once in Missouri’s modern history has a white man been executed for killing a black man, an 1984 prison killing committed by white supremacists.
“This research raises critical issues relating to the implementation of the death penalty in Missouri,” professor Michael Minta of the University of Missouri–Columbia, said in a news release announcing the findings. “The race or gender of a victim should not matter in the administration of justice in Missouri, but this new study shows that it does. Citizens and policymakers concerned about fairness and equity in our criminal justice system should review the findings of this important research.”
Opponents have long argued that the most significant factor in whether someone receives the death penalty is not the severity of the crime but rather where it is committed. Baumgartner’s study found that in Missouri, 92 of the state's 114 counties have carried out zero executions in the past four decades. Meanwhile, St. Louis County alone has accounted for more than one-fourth of all executions in the state. Just four jurisdictions—St. Louis, Jackson, and Callaway counties, plus the city of St. Louis—have accounted for more than half of all executions.
Certainly, the higher populations and crime rates in urban counties explain some of this discrepancy. But the whims of local prosecutors also make a big difference. In recent years, more defendants have been sentenced to die in St. Louis County, where Prosecutor Robert McCulloch strongly supports capital punishment, than in the city of St. Louis, where Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce is less aggressive in seeking executions.
“The most troubling finding is that these racial and geographic disparities are not measured by a few percentage points of difference,” Baumgartner noted in the news release. “Rather, they differ by orders of magnitude, demonstrating that Missouri’s death penalty is plagued by vast inequities which will undermine public confidence in the state’s ability to carry out the death penalty in a fair and impartial manner.”
