A Qualitative Analysis of Latinos Executed in the United States between 1975 and 1995: Who Were They?

Introduction A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON DEATH SENTENCE OUTCOMES (I.E., EXECUTIONS, commutations) shows evidence of discrimination against minority defendants. However, since prior research has followed an African American/Caucasian (or an execution/commutation) approach, Latino defendants have either been excluded or treated as a monolithic group. (1) Hence, little is known about death sentence dispositions for Latinos, whose experiences differ from those of African Americans and Caucasians, and even less is known about the treatment of the various ethnic groups (e.g., Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans) that constitute the Latino community. (2) Therefore, the main objective of this study is to go beyond the traditional African American/Caucasian dichotomous approach by evaluating existing qualitative information on death sentence outcomes for the entire United States between 1975 and 1995. I will seek to create an interpretive context for the information presented here. Discussed within a historical and theoretical framework, the findings show that discrimination in death sentence outcomes is not a phenomenon of the past. Race/ethnicity and several legal and extra legal variables continue to play a role in determining who should die and who should be granted a commutation. Capital punishment, the most severe form of criminal punishment in the view of some scholars, has been a complex and polemical topic due largely to claims that it is disproportionately applied to minority defendants, especially if they are poor. Ever since the first executions of minorities in the United States, scholars have debated whether there is conclusive evidence of arbitrary selection in the application of the death penalty. Some observers claim that there is no scientific evidence of race or ethnic discrimination in death sentences or death sentence dispositions, yet others find the evidence clearly indicates that capital punishment is reserved almost exclusively for society's "little people." Capital punishment researchers have focused almost exclusively on unequal death sentencing of African American and Caucasian defendants. Only one study (Marquart et al., 1994) has examined unequal death sentence outcomes (executions and commutations) by race and ethnicity, and only two studies (Aguirre and Baker, 1989; 1997) have examined the execution of Latinos (i.e., Mexicans). Such approaches have one major limitation (see Aguirre and Baker, 1988; Garcia, 1994; Perea, 1997). When researchers overlook people of Spanish heritage, or treat them as a monolithic group, usually under the broad media-created labels of "Hispanic" or "Latino," important issues are neglected. (3) For instance, to which ethnic group did the Latinos executed post-Furman belong? What were the experiences and characteristics of the individuals who lost their lives at the hands of the state? People of Spanish heritage constitute the largest minority group in the U.S. and are a very diverse population, whose experiences in the U.S., and, by extension, treatment by the criminal justice system, differ from those of African Americans. Equally important, the diverse experiences of the various ethnic groups (e.g., Cubans, Mexicans/Mejicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans) that make up the Latino population have been neglected. There is wide variation in how the various ethnic groups view themselves and each other, and how the Caucasian majority perceives them. The treatment of the various ethnic groups by the criminal justice system also varies widely. This study thus seeks to go beyond the African American/Caucasian dichotomous approach by disaggregating the group of Latinos executed between 1975 and 1995 in the United States. This timeframe was selected because: (1) the information was readily available; (2) this 20-year period allows us to test for ethnic effects immediately post-Furman; and (3) several other studies have used similar timeframes, thus allowing us to compare findings in terms of ethnic and race effects. …