Tucson, Arizona Sunday, 21 September 2003
By Michael Graczyk
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/Sun/30921NTexasExecutions-Race.html
HOUSTON - When convicted killer Larry Allen Hayes voluntarily went to the death
chamber earlier this month, it marked the first time in several decades that
Texas executed a white person for killing a black person.
Texas has accounted for more than one-third of the 875 executions in the United
States since the Supreme Court brought back capital punishment in 1976, but
Hayes, put to death for killing two people, one of whom was black, was the only
white executed by the state for killing a black during that time. Texas resumed
capital punishment in 1982.
Death penalty opponents say it underscores a nationwide problem.
Since the Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume, there have been
only a dozen cases nationally where a white offender was executed in a case
where the victim was black, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund says. That amounts
to just over 1 percent of executions.
"It's about four times more likely you'll get the death penalty if you
kill a white person," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death
Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based organization opposed to capital
punishment.
Josh Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor and death penalty supporter, disputed that
notion.
"I don't believe it is a function of race," Marquis said. "If
you really look statistically, people convicted of capital murder who are white
are twice as likely to be actually executed than if they're black."
The NAACP says 53 percent of the nation's executions involve white victims
and white defendants. Just over 20 percent involved black defendants killing
blacks. And blacks executed for killing whites account for about 21 percent
of the total. A small percentage involved victims of multiple races.
Texas figures nearly duplicate the national percentages, although less than
10 percent of those executed have been black for crimes against blacks.
The last time Texas killed a white for killing a black may have been in 1854, when James Wilson was executed in Tyler County for the death of another white man's favorite slave, meaning the punishment at the time essentially was for a property crime, said Bill Hayes, a capital punishment historian.