Study indicates pattern in sentences
Posted on Monday, September 8, 2008
Frank Williams Jr. and the three other people who have been sentenced to death in the judicial district that includes Lafayette County have this in common: All of them are black, and their victims were white.
As part of a study commissioned by Williams’ attorney, University of Iowa law professor David Baldus examined 124 murder cases filed in the district from 1990 to 2005. He found that, even after adjusting for factors such as the killer’s criminal history and the circumstances of the crime, blacks who killed whites were more likely than others to be charged with capital murder and sentenced to death.
“It suggests to us that there’s a real risk that race may have been a factor in this case,” Baldus said last week.
In filings with the Arkansas Parole Board, assistant federal public defender Julie Brain contends that Williams is the victim of discrimination and should be granted clemency and spared from execution.
Brent Haltom, prosecuting attorney for Miller and Lafayette counties, called the study “bizarre” and “absolutely, positively wrong.” “They didn’t talk to anyone down here about the cases,” Haltom said. “How do they know what should have been filed and what shouldn’t have been filed without talking to the police and witnesses ? It’s ridiculous.” “It’s just a bogus opinion,” Haltom said of the study. “It’s damaging, because they can say whatever they want to and get their fee, and they don’t even have to come to this state.” Baldus said he was paid $ 150 an hour, but he didn’t know his total bill. Brain declined to comment, citing her office’s policy on pending cases.
Shannon Tuckett, the managing public defender for Miller and Lafayette counties since 2004, said she hasn’t seen any evidence of bias by Haltom or his deputy prosecutors.
“My sense is they’ve been very cautious and judicious in seeking the death penalty,” Tuckett said.
She added, “If I ever saw in any way, for any reason, one of my clients was being discriminated against, I would be the first to raise a ruckus about it.” The study, along with an evaluation showing that Williams is mentally retarded, was included in Williams’ application for clemency, filed in July.
Last month, the state Parole Board voted 4-3 to recommend that Gov. Mike Beebe grant the request, with all three of the board’s black members voting in favor of clemency. Beebe has not decided on the request.
In the meantime, Williams ’ execution, originally scheduled for Tuesday, has been placed on hold because of a ruling by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox that the Arkansas Department of Correction did not follow the proper procedures when it revised its lethal injection protocol in response to a lawsuit by Williams and other death-row inmates.
The study mirrors research since the mid-1970 s that has shown that the killers of whites are more likely than those who kill blacks to be sentenced to death, said Michael Radelet, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has conducted a dozen studies on the topic.
Some studies have also shown that the race of the defendant matters — with black killers facing a greater risk of receiving death sentences. But those findings have been weaker and less consistent, Radelet said.
Since most murderers kill people of their own race, the upshot is that white killers are usually more likely than blacks to receive death sentences, Radelet said. Arkansas’ death row includes 24 blacks and 15 whites.
Baldus, Radelet added, is considered a pioneer of research in the field. One of his studies, involving the examination of more than 2, 000 murder cases in Georgia in the 1970 s, led to a challenge that reached the U. S. Supreme Court. In its opinion, in 1987, the court ruled that the statistics weren’t enough to prove discrimination in a particular case.
“At most, the Baldus study indicates a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race,” Justice Lewis Powell wrote in the case, McCleskey v. Kemp. He added: “In light of the safeguards designed to minimize racial bias in the process,” the study “does not demonstrate a constitutionally significant risk of bias.” Baldus conducted his study in the Williams case earlier this year, along with University of Iowa statistics professor George Woodworth and sociologist Neil Weiner of Philadelpia.
With help from Brain and other attorneys, the researchers compiled a database of every murder case filed in the judicial district that includes Lafayette County from 1990 through 2005.
From 1990 through 1998, the study included cases filed in Lafayette, Hempstead, Miller and Nevada counties, which made up the 8 th Judicial District. After Jan. 1, 1999, when Lafayette and Miller became the 8 th-South District, the study included only cases filed in the new district.
The researchers used information from court documents and newspaper articles to develop a list of 66 cases in which they determined that, based on Arkansas statutes and details of the crime, prosecutors could have sought the death penalty.
While blacks were defendants in only 38 of the potential deathpenalty cases, nine of the 10 defendants for whom prosecutors sought a death sentence were black. Similarly, whites were victims in 35 of the potential death penalty cases, but they were the victims in seven of the 10 cases in which the death penalty was sought.
Only nine of the 66 potential death penalty cases had both black defendants and white victims.
The researchers also factored in the number of “aggravating circumstances” — elements juries are required to consider — such as a defendants’ previous convictions or a manner of slaying that is “especially cruel or depraved.” Even after adjusting for those, black defendants who killed whites had a significantly greater risk of being sentenced to death, the researchers report..
That no white defendants or killers of black people received death sentences was particularly telling, Baldus said.
“The disparities are not normally as stark as this,” he said.
The study counts death row inmate Justin Anderson’s case twice because the original death sentence, in 2002, for fatally shooting an 87-year-old woman as she worked in her garden in Lewisville, in Lafayette County, was overturned, and he was convicted and sentenced to death again in the same case in 2005.
Williams, now 42, shot and killed 49-year-old Clyde Spence of Bradley in 1992 after being fired for breaking a tractor. The others sentenced to death include Joe Dansby, who raped a Prescott woman before killing her and her fiance in rural Nevada County in 1992, and Andrew Sasser, who beat and stabbed to death a clerk at an E-Z Mart in the Miller County town of Garland in 1993.
Haltom did seek a death sentence against one white defendant — William Hickson, in a Texarkana case. But a jury convicted Hickson of a lesser charge, second-degree murder, making him ineligible for a death sentence.
Jurors also spared four black defendants, sentencing them to life in prison without parole. One of those defendants killed a white person, and three of them killed blacks.
Haltom was first elected in the 8 th Judicial District in 1990 and has been prosecutor in the 8 th-South District since it was formed.
He denied any discrimination, saying his decisions on seeking the death penalty are based on the circumstances of the murder, the strength of the evidence and the wishes of the victim’s family.
He noted that the juries typically reflect the racial make-up of the community. In the area studied, the black population ranges from 24 percent of the population in Miller County to 36 percent in Lafayette County. In Williams’ case, five of the 12 jurors were black.
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