By Laura Bassett
The Huffington Post
WASHINGTON — Thirty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment and approved new sentencing criteria to make it less random, a new report has found that receiving the death penalty is still as arbitrary and unfair as being “struck by lightning.”
A number of factors unrelated to the crime, including race, geography and money, influence the sentencing of capital punishment as much as, if not more than, the severity of the actual crime, according to the study released Wednesday by the Death Penalty Information Center.
Defendants who kill white victims are far more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill black victims, the study found. Further, a vast majority of U.S. executions occur in only a handful of states; the quality of defense a defendant is able to afford affects his chances of receiving the death penalty; and county budgets are often a deciding factor in whether a district attorney will seek the death penalty or not. A number of these cases are overturned on appeal and assessed very differently the second time around, suggesting the decisions are often unjustified.
Full Story: Receiving Death Penalty Is As Random As Being ‘Struck By Lightning': Report