USA - Military. Military death sentence more likely for minorities

Study: Military death sentence more likely for minorities. A new study by a Michigan State University law professor found minorities in the military are twice as likely as whites to be sentenced to death. Catherine Grosso, associate professor at the MSU College of Law, and David Baldus, University of Iowa College of Law, studied military prosecutions in all potentially death-eligible murders from 1984 to 2005. The researchers identified 105 death-eligible murder cases and found unprecedented racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty in the United States military. Findings are published in this month’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. The racial disparity of minority defendants “sharply distinguishes the military system from the typical civilian system” at a “magnitude that is rarely seen in court systems,” the researchers found. In state court systems, most racial discrimination occurs when a victim is white, and is worse if the offender is a minority. Such discrimination also occurs in the military, but unlike state court systems, the race of the defendant – regardless of the race of the victim – remains prominent. Case in point: Of the 16 men the military has sentenced to death in the last 27 years, 10 were minorities, Grosso said.