We are becoming a world leader in keeping our own citizens in jail. In 1999, the United States was executing its own citizens at the rate of nearly two per week, the highest rate in forty years. There are now over thirty-six hundred people on U.S. death rows. With new, harsher laws on the books, the number of executions is expected to escalate. This is not merely a question of how many executions are carried out, but who is being executed.
Racism is clearly a factor in determining who gets executed.
In 1998, the Harvard Law Review undertook a comprehensive study of racial bias throughout the U.S. criminal justice system. And it's not just the guilty who are being executed, we are also taking the lives of those who have been falsely convicted. The danger that innocent people will be executed because of errors in the criminal justice system is getting worse. A total of 69 people have been released from death row since 1973 after evidence of their innocence emerged. Twenty-one condemned inmates have been released since 1993, including seven from the state of Illinois alone.