Racial discrimination in use of the death penalty was recognized by the United States Supreme Court in 1972, and a Court ruling that year ended executions throughout the country. Four years later the Court upheld a "guided-discretion" statute, and executions resumed again in 1977. Evidence compiled during recent years clearly shows continued systematic racial bias in states' discretionary use of the death penalty.

By July 1997, more than 3,269 men and women were imprisoned on death rows in the United States. The statistics on race clearly become significant when the race of the offender and that of the victim are considered. Although whites and blacks are victims of murder in approximately equal numbers, since 1977 the overwhelming majority of death row defendants, 80 percent, were executed for killing whites.

Blacks convicted of killing whites are far more likely than any other category of offender to receive a death sentence. Whites have rarely been sentenced to death for killing blacks, and, since the death penalty was reinstated, only 6 white persons have been executed for killing a black person. A study conducted by researchers from Northeastern University and the University of Florida in 1990 found that blacks convicted of killing whites in Florida were five times more likely to receive death sentences than whites convicted of killing whites. In Texas, blacks found guilty of killing whites were found to be six times more likely to receive the death penalty than whites convicted of killing whites.

"Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, and, despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake." -- Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Feb.22, 1994.

A study published in the Stanford Law Review in 1984 found similar disparities based on race in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Researchers found that in cases of white homicide victims, the defendant is between 2.3 and 9 times more likely to receive a death sentence than in cases of black victims.

The United States General Accounting Office released a report in early 1990 which found, even under present law, "a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty."

In March 1994 the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights issued a report showing that since 1988, in 9 out of 10 of the federal death penalty prosecutions the defendant was black or Hispanic. All defendants approved by Attorney General Janet Reno for death have been black.