Unequal Victims, Unequal Justice

by Lauren Pope

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My cousin Aaron was murdered. The last time anyone in my family saw him alive was when he came up to the hospital, high on meth, to try to see our grandfather who was in a coma. His sister sent him away. She told him that our grandmother didn't need to see him in such a state. He left, and for several days no one could get a hold of him. Then our grandfather died, and still, he ignored our calls. He missed the funeral. He missed the burial. After a few weeks, we had to accept that he was missing.

Everyone was sick with worry. We thought that perhaps he had overdosed on something and the hospitals hadn't been able to identify him. The truth was far worse. Months later, we learned that he had been kidnapped and murdered by his best friend. He was buried in a shallow grave at a farm outside of Wichita. The authorities had known about this for some time, thanks to an informant, but they chose not to move on the farm until they could make a larger drug bust.

By the time they found Aaron, his body was badly decomposed. This was a favorable condition for prosecutors, because it allowed them to say that cause of death could not be definitively determined. They made a deal with his killer: tell us what you know about the drug operation, and we'll only charge you with manslaughter. He agreed and served seven years in prison.

The implication to our family was very clear: Aaron's life didn't matter very much. This is a feeling that is unfortunately common. Our criminal justice system is not blind, and it is not evenly applied. Our death penalty system is even less so.

• In Louisiana, the odds of a death sentence were 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black.

•  A 2006 study on 600 death-eligible cases from Philadelphia between 1979 and 1999 found that "in cases involving a White victim, the more stereotypically Black a defendant is perceived to be, the more likely that person is to be sentenced to death."

•  A 2005 study in California found that homicides with white victims are 3.7 times as likely to result in the death penalty as homicides with African American victims and 4.73 times as likely as homicides with Hispanic victims.

Aaron was Native American, which put him at greater risk of being murdered. "In 2019, homicide was the fifth leading cause of death for American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) males and the seventh leading cause of death for AI/AN females aged 1–54 years."

Although not intentional, the existence of the death penalty sends the message to families of marginalized victims that their lives were not worth quite as much as the lives of the more privileged. If a wealthy white woman is murdered, her killer is much more likely to get the death penalty than if the same person had murdered a poor Black man. While there must, of course, be some variance in sentencing guidelines, the gap between life and death is intolerable.

We've created a system that weighs the value of one victim's life against another's. A drug-addicted Native man? His death can be settled for seven years in a local jail. The upstanding Mayor? Well, his killer must die. The death penalty is sold to the public as something that offers closure to grieving families, but for many families, it serves as a painful reminder of how little their loved one's life was worth.

Without the death penalty, these disparities would still exist, but the pain would be less acute. If nothing else, I would ask that those who support the death penalty please remember: it is not universally embraced by the families of victims. For some of us, its continued existence causes nothing but continued pain.