Documentary on legal activist and racial bias among American death row inmates

An Irish made documentary entitled "Black Death in Dixie: Racism and the Death Penalty in the United States" will be shown on RTE One on 1 March. It features Bryan Stevenson, an American lawyer who heads the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama (EJI). The EJI is a private, non-profit organisation that provides legal representation to poor defendants and prisoners in an American state with a death sentencing rate that is three to 10 times greater than that in other Southern States.

Stevenson recently gave a series of lectures in Ireland, in association with Amnesty International and the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway. He is a Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, a well known activist in the US, and a powerful speaker. According to Stevenson, the United States currently has 2.3 million people in prison. The figure was 300,000 only 30 years ago. Such is the increase in prisons that Stevenson speaks of a 'prison-industrial complex', a growth industry that employs many people in the US. The country has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population with one out of every 32 adults behind bars. One in three black men aged 18-30 is either in prison, on parole or on probation.

In 1972 the US Supreme Court imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, believing it to be unconstitutional, based on the case of Furman v. Georgia. However, in 1976 the decision was effectively overturned in many states by allowing for certain criteria that would make it acceptable for a death sentence to be pronounced. At the time, the Supreme Court was presented with evidence that in Georgia, black people were twice as likely as whites to receive the death penalty. The court's opinion was that "a certain amount of racial bias is inevitable" in such cases.
Stevenson holds that capital punishment, the death penalty, has 'long been a tactic for subjugating people of colour'.

According to the US General Accounting Office, "the race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e. those who murdered white were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks". A list of persons executed for interracial murders in the US since 1976 shows 15 where the defendant was white and the victim was black, but 213 when the defendant was black and the victim white. Considering that the population of the US is only 13% black, the fact that 41.8% of the current death row inmates are black speaks volumes about racial bias in the US justice system as well as the disadvantages faced by poor blacks.

Stevenson and the EJI have succeeded in gaining the release of 75 people from death row. With 3500 sentenced to death, the work is constant as inmates have no right to council, and if they do not lodge appeals by the deadline, they have no recourse as "courts prefer finality to fairness".

Many death row inmates were often too poor to pay their own lawyer during their first case. Court appointed lawyers earn less than the minimum wage, and in some instances were found to be drunk or asleep in court. Errors are made to the extent that for every eight people executed, an estimated one person is innocent.

Stevenson's untiring work is based on his belief that "you cannot judge a country on how they treat the rich, but on how they treat the poor, the disadvantaged". His work is inspiring, and he enhorts audiences and students recognise the power they have and not to "be afraid to change the world".

For more information visit www.eji.org
"Black Death in Dixie: Racism and the Death Penalty in the United States" - RTE One, 1 March.

Tom Rowe