DAY ONE

Patterns of disparities

In Georgia, race of victim, location of crime among factors that may influence which killers live, which die.

By HEATHER VOGELL

The death penalty carries a racial bias in Georgia, but it's not what most people think.

White killers are more likely to face capital prosecution and land on death row, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. The reason: White killers are more likely to kill white people.

A statistical analysis shows Georgia prosecutors were more than twice as likely to seek the death penalty when the victim was white.

The newspaper and University of Maryland criminologist Ray Paternoster analyzed 10 years of death-eligible murder convictions, asking: Does who or where murderers kill affect their chances of getting death?

The answer was yes to both.

Clear patterns in the data show Georgia's 49 judicial circuits carried out the death penalty in starkly different ways, Paternoster said.

"There's no Georgia capital punishment law," he said. "There's one in one county, and in another county there's a totally different one."

Paternoster, who did a similar study in Maryland, used statistical tools to control for key differences between cases, including the number of victims, evidence of rape, torture or drugs, or a confession. He also took into account the racial population in the county of crime.

The disparity between prosecutors' treatment of killers of whites — versus killers of blacks — was most pronounced in less severe cases, the analysis found. The discrepancy nearly disappeared for the most severe murders.

"Black victims have to be really, really brutalized before they're treated the same as a white-victim case," Paternoster said.

The imbalance was greatest in northern and southwestern Georgia. In DeKalb and Fulton County, however, a white victim had no impact.

The analysis showed a similar difference in sentencing. When facing capital prosecution, killers of whites were more than twice as likely to land on death row. Eighteen of the last 20 murderers executed in Georgia were white. All but one killed white people.

Two-thirds of respondents in a poll conducted for the newspaper last fall said they did not believe prosecutors pursued execution more often for the killers of white victims.

Critics of the death penalty say such findings show the judicial system — consciously or not — values white life more. Supporters say the studies fail to consider the complexity of cases.

Researchers don't have a simple explanation. But Paternoster said historical differences between whites' and minorities' support for the death penalty, and their relationship with authorities, could help explain the disparity.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that patterns of discrimination do not prove unconstitutional bias in a specific case, essentially blocking the use of such statistics in death appeals.

Race and geography are intertwined, Paternoster said. But he found Georgia court circuits' handling of the death penalty varied widely even when the victim's race was taken into account.

Prosecutors were 4.5 times more likely to seek death in the circuit that includes Augusta than in Cobb County, for instance. In terms of sentencing, central Georgia killers were more than three times as likely to end up on death row as killers in the 11-county metro Atlanta area.

The findings show the death penalty is not applied uniformly in Georgia, Paternoster said, but it is not beyond repair.

"Is it all bad?" he said. "No. There is rationality in the system. We can enhance it."