Black Americans remain deeply skeptical of the criminal justice system, and for good reason. It is riven by race-consciousness and undermined by private prejudices.

Every police officer and every prosecutor, every judge and every juror brings to his judgments a set of values — of which he is often barely conscious — about which crimes are worse, which defendants are more dangerous, which victims are more wholesome. Those deeply ingrained biases have historically worked against black Americans, who have been lynched for crimes that didn't happen, imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit and subjected to harsher punishments than whites for crimes they did commit.

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Those prejudices have been dampened by the movement for racial equality, but they've hardly disappeared. They still crop up in cases such as the so-called "Jena Six," a group of six Louisiana black teenagers accused of beating a white teen after months of racial unrest. Because several of the black kids were harshly overcharged — accused of attempted murder — the case has drawn national attention. Thousands of black demonstrators, including metro Atlantans, converged on Jena last week in protest.

But there is another, less obvious disparity in the criminal justice system, one that has not received the attention it deserves. It's not just black criminal defendants who are treated unfairly. So are black victims, whose lives and losses are often undervalued. Nowhere is that more apparent than in death sentences meted out in Georgia, where, over the last decade, prosecutors have been more than twice as likely to seek the death penalty when the victim was white than when the victim was black.

A team of Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters has just completed an exhaustive report on the death penalty in this state; their findings show capital punishment remains as capricious as it was 35 years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for that very reason. (Their series, "A Matter of Life or Death," starts in the AJC today.) Eighteen of the last 20 murderers executed in Georgia were white. All but one killed white people, according to the report.

"It's like there's a race-specific definition for how serious or horrible a homicide is," University of Maryland criminologist Ray Paternoster told the AJC. "Black victims have to be really, really brutalized before they're treated the same as a white-victim case."

Like the mistreatment of black criminal defendants, the dismissive attitude toward black victims has a long history. Many elderly black men and women can tell stories of murdered love ones never avenged by law enforcement authorities because they couldn't be bothered with lives they believed less important. Those traditions have been muted but not yet overcome.

Even black politicians and activists pay less attention to cases where black victims are given short shrift. Though most crime involves a victim and a perpetrator of the same race, there is no tradition of outrage on behalf of black victims who are attacked by black assailants. Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, who is black, has noticed the difference.

"Everyday my office ... handles horrible cases involving the sexual assault and/or death of black children, black women and black senior citizens. It is difficult for me to recall an occasion wherein my office has received a note, card, letter or phone call from any black advocacy group or political leader in support of these victims. We receive many communications in support of black defendants in some of those same cases," he wrote in an e-mail.

"I am very disturbed about what's happened to Genarlow Wilson and the 'Jena Six,' but I am equally disturbed by the plight of the endless number of black victims who don't have the benefit of community support or outrage," he said.

The disparate application of the death penalty is one more excellent reason to abandon its use. But that would merely mute — not change — a distinct pattern of assigning more value to the tribulations of white crime victims. Even outside death penalty cases, there is still a tendency for prosecutors to treat more harshly defendants in those cases that attract community outrage.

It's high time for more of that outrage against black criminals who murder and maim black victims.