Report examines ‘persistent racial disparities’ in federal death penalty use

WASHINGTON (OSV News) — As activists push President Joe Biden to commute existing federal death sentences during his final months in office, a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center examined what it called persistent racial disparities in federal death penalty prosecutions.

The report found that since 1989, nearly three in four defendants authorized for federal death penalty prosecution have been people of color, marking an overrepresentation of non-white defendants.

“A punishment that was once reserved for exceptional cases pertaining to narrow federal interests has since been used to perpetuate racially biased and discriminatory practices throughout history,” said the report, released Nov. 14.

Titled “Fool’s Gold: How the Federal Death Penalty Has Perpetuated Racially Discriminatory Practices Throughout History,” the report comes as anti-death penalty activists, including a leading Catholic organization, have argued that Biden, who was the first U.S. president to campaign on ending the use of the federal death penalty, has not followed through on that pledge.

Catholic Mobilizing Network is among advocacy groups encouraging Biden to fulfill his promise in the post-election period with concrete action, such as commuting every existing federal death sentence, before President-elect Donald Trump, who has sought to expand the use of capital punishment, returns to the White House.

The report from the Washington-based DPI criticized arguments from capital punishment proponents that the federal practice is a “gold standard” with “the highest quality legal representation for those accused of a narrow set of exceptional crimes,” leading to a stronger process than its state-level equivalents. Instead, the report said, the practice at the federal level has the same systemic problems as state death penalty systems, “including arbitrariness, ineffective legal representation, and especially, racial bias.”

Tiana Herring, the DPI’s racial justice data storyteller and the lead author of the report, said the report shows “the deeply embedded racial discrimination within the federal death penalty.”

“Our findings reveal that the same historical biases and inequities that marred the federal death penalty’s origins persist today, with Black and Native American people bearing the brunt of its application,” Herring said in a Nov. 14 statement announcing the report.

In DPI’s statement, Executive Director Robin M. Maher said, “We hope that elected officials will seriously consider this in-depth study of the historical and modern-day use of the federal death penalty before making any decisions about future use.”

Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, a Washington-based group that advocates for the abolition of capital punishment in line with Catholic teaching, said the DPI report “underscores how racial bias has played a major role in who is sentenced to death in the United States.”

“Our nation’s history of slavery, lynching and segregation are no doubt manifest in contemporary injustices such as capital punishment,” she told OSV News. “Catholic Mobilizing Network has consistently raised the relationship between the nation’s past and modern-day systems of oppression — particularly related to the criminal legal system. For generations, the sin of racism has perpetuated the immoral practice of capital punishment. These are inextricably linked to where we find ourselves today, in desperate need of detangling ourselves from this racist and failed system.”

Catholics and people of goodwill, she said, “must take every conceivable opportunity to advance toward the abolition of the death penalty.”

After Biden was elected, his administration declared a moratorium on existing federal executions, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said he would conduct a review of the policies and procedures surrounding the federal practice. However, Biden has not formally ended the practice, and his administration has defended some existing death sentences for those convicted of high-profile mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo, New York.

Vaillancourt Murphy said CMN is “redoubling” efforts “to urge President Biden to act justly and mercifully to commute the sentences of all 40 men on federal death row before he leaves office.”

“As the Holy Father Pope Francis said in his Bull of Indiction announcing Jubilee 2025, Catholics should ‘be one in demanding dignified conditions for those in prison, respect for their human rights and above all the abolition of the death penalty, a provision at odds with Christian faith and one that eliminates all hope of forgiveness and rehabilitation,'” she said.

If Biden commutes existing death sentences, Vaillancourt Murphy, he would “ensure that not one of the 40 men on federal death row is executed.”

“President Biden can offer each a tangible sign of hope,” she said. “His action will not bring an immediate end to the death penalty at the federal or state level, but it could very well be the beginning of the end.”

A Nov. 14 Gallup poll found younger generations of U.S. adults are less likely than older generations to favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, a departure from previous surveys two decades ago that found no meaningful age differences in views of the death penalty.

Currently, fewer than half of U.S. adults born after 1980 — millennials and Generation Zs — favor the death penalty. But about six in 10 adults in older generations support such practices, Gallup found.

This trend is partly responsible for support for the death penalty in the U.S. falling to 53 percent, a level not reported by Gallup since the early 1970s.

The Catholic Church’s magisterium opposes the use of the death penalty as inconsistent with the inherent sanctity of human life, and advocates for the practice’s abolition worldwide. In his 2020 encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis cited St. John Paul II’s critique of the practice, writing that his predecessor “stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice.”

“There can be no stepping back from this position,” Pope Francis wrote. Echoing the teaching he clarified in his 2018 revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the pope said, “Today we state clearly that the death penalty is inadmissible and the church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.”

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