NEW YORK, Feb. 14 (UPI) -- A statistical analysis of the races of U.S. convicts who are sentenced to death shows African-Americans are actually underrepresented on death row.
The study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, shows although blacks commit 51.5 percent of all murders nationally, they constitute about 42 percent of death row convicts, the New York Times reported Saturday.
"We have somehow managed," Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School said, "in the death penalty context to overcome centuries of embedded racism and administer a system of ultimate punishment where defendants will be judged more nearly by the circumstances of their crimes and the contents of their character than by the color of their skin."
According to the Justice Department, black murder victims were killed by black assailants 94 percent of the time, while white murder victims were killed by white assailants 86 percent of the time, the study said.
