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A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
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Friday July 03, 2015
The U.S. County that Sentences the Most People to Death is a Parish
Recommended reading: Rachel Aviv's latest New Yorker piece, “Revenge Killing,” about Rodricus Crawford, a young black man in Shreveport, Louisiana, which is part of Caddo Parish, who was charged, convicted and sentenced to death for the death of his own 1-year old son. It includes this paragraph:
Juries in Caddo Parish, which has a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America. Seventy-seven per cent of those sentenced to death in the past forty years have been black, and nearly half were convicted of killing white victims. A white person has never been sentenced to death for killing a black person.
The assistant D.A. (and now D.A.) who prosecuted the case, Dale Cox, “has been responsible for more than a third of the death penalties in Louisiana,” Aviv writes. She interviews him. He seems straightforward. He is a very effective lawyer who used to be against the death penalty and is now, in his 60s, in favor of it in Biblical proportions.
Reading, I wondered if the last sentence in the above quote meant that no white person had been executed for killing a black person in Shreveport or in the whole of the United States, but it must be the former because I've found evidence of the latter —although it's exceedingly rare. Some numbers from the Death Penalty Information Center:
Persons Executed for Interracial Murders in the U.S. Since 1976
- White Defendant / Black Victim (31)
- Black Defendant / White Victim (294)
As for Crawford? Much of the evidence that convicted him was determined by the Parish's forensic pathologist, but that evidence has been refuted by others around the country. One coroner says he finds the autopsy results so wrong he's “horrified”; another pathologist thinks Shreveport's pathologist "did not seem willing to consider the facts of the case. From the article, it seems a monumental injustice is taking place.