Racism and Capital Punishment: Looking "death-worthy"

Capital punishment is a highly contentious issue which divides nations; some think it's highly immoral and that offenders should be made to face what they've done in prison or be rehabilitated, whilst others think that death is the only punishment for death, and that some simply do not deserve to live.

In the United States, it's legal in some states to issue the death penalty. A decent amount of states which issue death penalties are in the Southern states, which have typically or historically been more racist and prejudiced, particularly against black people.

Eberhardt suggested that the more "stereotypically black" your features, the more likely it is you'll receive the death penalty in death eligible cases. Though this theory is fairly extreme and isn't something most of us consider or might think, there's a heavy racial bias in prison populations, and it's true that the criminal justice system in the US is heavily dominated by white people and that in some areas of the US as well as in many other cultures, racial discrimination is still around. 

Eberhardt conducted an analysis of a database of "death-eligible" cases in Philadelphia between 1979 and 1999. In 44 of these cases, a black man had killed a white victim. Photographs of these men were shown to naive raters, who were asked to rate the men on the extent to which they had stereotypically "black" features. The men with the most stereotypically black features were given the death penalty 57.4% of the time, which was considerably more than those with the less stereotypically black features, who received the death penalty 24.4% of the time. There was no difference when the victim was black, suggesting whilst stereotypically black men were considered more death-worthy, black victims were perceived as less important.