The death penalty is racist  Like the rest of the American criminal justice system, capital punishment in America is institutionally racist: black men make up 6% of the US population as a whole but 40% of those on Death Row [1] . In the US, African-Americans and White people are murdered in almost equal numbers, but 80% of those executed since 1977 were convicted of the murder of a white [2] .  [1] Blecker, p.237  [2] Amnesty International, “United States of America: Death by Discrimination – the continuing role of race in capital cases”, Amnesty International, 2003,