Racial and Gendered Disparities in Death Penalty Sentencing
The Roots of Racial Disparities
Racial inequality within capital punishment is not accidental. It emerges from a mixture of historical legacy, structural bias, and political incentives. In the United States, the death penalty is the direct successor of racial terror lynching. When public lynchings became an international embarrassment, the violence did not disappear, it merely shifted into courtrooms. Black defendants, once killed by mobs, were instead condemned by all-white juries, rushed trials, and discriminatory laws that made certain offences capital only when committed by people of colour. These origins left a structural imprint. Today, the same forces continue to shape capital cases. The death penalty concentrates where poverty meets racial marginalisation. Counties with histories of segregation, prosecutors who face political pressure to appear “tough,” and defence systems so underfunded that poor defendants receive representation that is often little more than symbolic.
This explains why the system produces errors at a staggering scale. Since 1973, for every eight people executed in the U.S., one person on death row has been exonerated. Misconduct, coerced witnesses, false forensics, and inadequate counsel disproportionately affect people of colour. “Black defendants, for instance, are vastly more likely to face official misconduct. 87% of Black death-row exonerees experienced it, compared to about two-thirds of white exonerees. These are not random mistakes, but predictable outcomes of a system built on inequality.
What Racial Disparities Look Like in the United States
Racial inequality in the U.S. death penalty becomes undeniable. Black Americans make up only 13% of the population, yet they account for 41% of the death row population and 34% of those executed. Race-of-victim bias is even starker, three-quarters of all executions in the modern era involve cases with white victims, even though nearly half of murder victims in the U.S. are Black. This is not because crimes against white victims are more severe. It is because prosecutors, juries, and political incentives value some lives more than others. When a victim is white, prosecutors are far more willing to seek death, and juries, often lacking Black representation due to discriminatory jury strikes, are more willing to impose it.
The system’s racial inequality also appears in wrongful convictions. Since 1973, for every eight people executed in the U.S., one person on death row has been exonerated. Black defendants are disproportionately represented among those wrongfully sentenced to die, and 87% of Black death-row exonerees were victims of official misconduct, ranging from suppressed evidence to coerced witnesses.
Beyond America: A Transnational System of Discrimination
The U.S. is not unique. Across the world, capital punishment disproportionately targets ethnic minorities. In South Africa, before the abolition of the death penalty, execution patterns reflected the country’s racial order. Under white minority rule, Black South Africans were executed at far higher rates than white defendants. Offences involving alleged harm to white people, particularly white women, were the least likely to receive clemency. As scholars such as Andrew Novak and David T. Johnson have shown, apartheid South Africa used capital punishment as a mechanism of racial domination, parallel to the way lynching enforced white supremacy in the American South. Even after colonial structures formally ended, the legacy of racialised punishment persisted. Under apartheid-era law, Black defendants faced rapid trials, limited legal representation, and death sentences imposed at rates that treated Black lives as expendable. As in the U.S., capital punishment became a tool not of protecting society, but of reinforcing racial hierarchy.
Across these countries, the pattern is consistent in that, wherever there is historical racial stratification, the death penalty reproduces it.
Toward Reform: What Must Change
If societies are to keep the death penalty, they must first confront the deep inequities that define its use. That means reforming jury selection, guaranteeing competent and well-funded legal defence, enforcing protections for foreign nationals, and establishing independent bodies to review misconduct and coerced testimony. It means eliminating mandatory death sentences, particularly for drug offences that disproportionately target vulnerable migrants. It means acknowledging that the race of victims and defendants still determines outcomes and working to dismantle the structures that make that possible.
But the deeper question remains, can a punishment so closely tie to racism, colonial history, discrimination, and structural inequality ever be administered fairly? Across the world, from American courts to Middle Eastern detention centres to Southeast Asian prisons, the evidence suggests the answer is no. The death penalty does not correct the harms of crime; it reproduces the harms of inequality. Until societies confront that truth, the injustice will continue.
The Hidden Gender Inequalities of Capital Punishment in the United States
While women account for a small proportion of those sentenced to death in the United States, the system through which they are prosecuted and sentenced is deeply shaped by gender bias and structural inequality. Research by Cornell Law Professor Sandra Babcock reveals that the experiences of women facing capital prosecution are profoundly influenced by the overwhelmingly male-dominated nature of the criminal legal system and a persistent failure to understand women’s lived realities.
A Male-Dominated System
Professor Babcock’s research demonstrated that the vast majority of women sentenced to death in the US are judged in spaces dominated by men, with 96% being prosecuted by male prosecutors, 89% appearing before male judges and over one third faced exclusively male decision-makers throughout their case. This matters because, as Babcock argues, “women experience male-dominated spaces differently than men”, especially when their cases involve intimate partner violence or histories of abuse. Women are not solely judged for their alleged crimes, but also for how they conform to traditional expectations of femininity. There are three dominant prosecutorial strategies used against women, all rooted in damaging gender stereotypes, including hyper sexualisation, attacking motherhood and the ‘manipulative woman’ narrative. These narratives do not seek fair justice and truth but instead utilise prejudice and reinforce a culture where deviance from prescribed gender roles is punished as harshly as the crime itself.
Furthermore, there is significant differences in how men and women approach capital cases, with women prosecutors tending to show greater leniency toward female defendants and women judges voting more liberally in capital appeals. However, women remain severely underrepresented in prosecutorial roles (around 22%) and are often absent from positions of power in capital litigation. This is a profound issue with women’s ability to feel heard and fully participate in their own defence as this depends on their capacity to “see themselves reflected in the courtroom”. This imbalance raises serious concerns about whether women defendants can truly receive impartial and empathetic justice, with the absence of diverse perspectives directly impacting the quality of justice women receive.
Trauma being Ignored
An overwhelming 96% of women on US death row have experienced one or more forms of gender-based violence prior to their alleged offence, including childhood abuse or sexual violence. However, these experiences are frequently dismissed or minimised by prosecutors who frame their survival strategies as personal choices rather than responses to trauma. Missing out this key contextual component of trauma fundamentally distorts the legal narrative and hinders truthful justice from occurring. The case of Brittany Holberg illustrates this, as despite a childhood marked by drug exposure and later exploitation through sex work, prosecutors portrayed her life as a sequence of morally reprehensible decisions, essentially removing her experiences of any mitigating value. These narratives dehumanise women defendants whilst also reinforcing harmful myths surrounding responsibility and blame.
In conclusion, this gendered bias violates fundamental rights in the US, including the right to a fair trial and raises fundamental questions about the legitimacy of capital punishment in the United States. When essential facts regarding trauma and abuse are ignored, the use of capital punishment becomes unjust and subsequently deeply discriminatory. Addressing these inequalities is essential for reform and subsequently abolition, to provide a critical step towards preventing a system that perpetuates discrimination and violence.
