December 11th, 2024

The death penalty is a racial justice issue

Jamila Hodge

Although imperfect, history can be a powerful guide as we strive to improve, whether individually or collectively. Our nation’s history of lynching is one example of the many lessons that should galvanize us to make the lofty promise of “liberty and justice for all” more attainable.

Researchers have documented more than 4,400 lynchings of African Americans in the wake of slavery’s end. And those same researchers recognize that many more killings are lost to time and incomplete records.

But this history — built on data — is clear. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Our nation condoned extrajudicial executions of Black people for generations. Then the government systematized that violence and oppression into our modern death penalty system. The steady decline in the number of lynchings, beginning in the 1890s, intersects with the rise in executions into the 1930s and 40s.

Black people remain a primary target. Since 1976, 34% of the people we have executed were Black, nearly three times our share of the population.

Federal death row is even worse. Thirty-eight percent of the 40 people currently sentenced to die are Black. Several of them were sentenced by all-white juries, according to the Federal Capital Habeas Project.

This is one of many reasons — and I think the most important — for President Joe Biden to commute federal death row before he leaves office.

I worked for then-Vice President Biden in 2010 as an advisor for criminal justice and drug policy. This came in the middle of a dozen years I spent as a federal prosecutor. During that year, I got to spend enough time with Biden to see his heart, empathy, and compassion. He recognizes that human beings are capable of redemption and transformation.

When he ran for president in 2020, he was the first candidate to openly oppose capital punishment. Now time is running out to put his moral opposition — shared by an ever-growing percentage of Americans — into action. He can write a new historical chapter in which we no longer pretend that this system, so deeply flawed in so many ways, is not also racist to the core.

And if he doesn’t?

President-elect Trump was quite consistent throughout his campaign that featured an abundance of racist, sexist, or dehumanizing rhetoric, often weaved together. All of it underscored a clear affinity for violence and oppression.

And he has already demonstrated that these are more than words. In the final months of his first term, Trump launched an execution spree that totaled 13 killings, the last six coming after he had lost the election. And Project 2025, the playbook assembled by a team of Trump’s advisors, calls for another execution spree that won’t end until all 40 people currently on death row — each of them a son to parents — are killed.

While he clears death row with one hand, he will almost certainly refill it by directing the Department of Justice to seek more death sentences. He has often suggested an expansion of the charges that could result in death, including for drug traffickers.

Let’s acknowledge his racist history. The federal government charged his family’s real estate business with discrimination in the 1970s for denying Black people apartments. In 1989, he publicly called for the executions of five Black kids, better known as the Central Park Five, for a crime they didn’t commit. And he used “birther” lies about President Obama to somehow become an influential political figure.

There is a name for the actions that we should expect in the near future, from the continued dehumanization of marginalized populations to the promise of mass deportation to the expectation that his staff and appointees pledge blind loyalty to his whims.

It’s called authoritarianism — a relentless exercise to accrue and maintain power at the expense of the people.

There are plenty of Black people living today who lived under authoritarianism, as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones recently explained. They had to fight for their voting rights, withstand police violence and mass incarceration, navigate systems of economic oppression. If we don’t want to go back, we have to fight for our rights, inch by inch.

One of the first steps we can take is by urging President Biden to act. Yes, these are uncertain times. That doesn’t mean we have to give up the on the things we can control.

Mr. President, you can determine that there will be no more bloodshed in our names, over false promises of safety. You can march us one final step toward a more just world. What comes after January 20, you can’t control, but 40 souls hang in the balance until then.

Jamila Hodge is the chief executive officer of Equal Justice USA, a national organization transforming the justice system through community-centered responses to violence that save lives and heal communities.