The death penalty should be abolished because its application is racially biased, said federal public defender Gary Christopher during a Thursday speech sponsored by the AU student group Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
There is a "very substantial racial disparity in the application of the death penalty," Christopher said.
Christopher, a lawyer with the federal public defender's office in Baltimore, works mostly on death penalty cases. One of his clients, Wesley Baker, is currently on death row.
Christopher's speech focused on the death penalty in Maryland.
"Maryland has been a death-belt state since 1978, but it's really not had its heart in the death penalty," Christopher said.
After more than 25 years and millions of dollars, only three people have been executed in the state, and seven more are currently waiting, Christopher said.
He called the death penalty "demonstrably unfair," citing a study conducted at the University of Maryland by criminology professor Dr. Raymond Paternoster, which found that race does play a part in deciding who receives capital punishment. The death penalty tends to punish black men who kill white men more harshly than white men who kill black men, Christopher said.
Maryland courts may not be as eager to administer the death penalty as some other states, but "they sure value white victims," Christopher said.
Christopher also argued that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to crime.
"Except for the nuts that like to kill people, the only reason a person could be in favor of the death penalty is that they think it achieves something and that it is a way to get at the worst of the worst," he said. "Some say it's a deterrent, some say it isn't."
The argument that if criminals know what punishment they face, they will be less likely to commit crime is false, Christopher said.
"I've never had a single client for whom having a death penalty on the books would have made a difference," he said. "Criminals ... can't think 20 feet ahead of themselves. There's this notion that they can engage in these sorts of nice calculations of what's going to happen to them ... [it] does not enter into their thinking at all."
Criminals sometimes even prefer the death penalty to life in prison, Christopher said.
"I've had to convince many clients to accept life in prison as an alternative to the death penalty," he said. "They don't want to be locked up forever. ... That's what's real for them."
Christopher encouraged the audience to get involved in pushing for change in death penalty laws.
"Write your legislature. Write people in committees," he said, adding that he would like to find more ways for advocacy groups to be involved in litigation as well.
The AU chapter of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, dedicated to educating people about the death penalty and advocating its abolition, sponsored the event.
"The ideal situation would be abolition," Christopher said. "And I think it's going to happen some day"
