Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Banks Case
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 5/2/2003
If the Supreme Court had not intervened on March 12, 2003, ten minutes before 6 p.m., Delma Banks Jr. would be dead.He would be dead despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence. He would have been executed on the basis of testimony from hardened criminals who made deals with the prosecution concerning their prior convictions.
This form of sentencing is deeply flawed, and imposes an irreversible penalty. Some of capital punishment’s most glaring problems include racism, classism, overworked and in some cases incompetent defense attorneys, corrupt prosecutors and indifferent judges.
The fact that Banks’ case made it to the Supreme Court despite the protests of several judges over the undaunted efforts of the state of Texas to execute Banks.
William Sessions, former FBI director and federal judge stated in an amicus brief he filed with two other former federal judges, "The questions presented in Mr. Banks' petition directly implicate the integrity of the administration of the death penalty in this country... The prosecutors in this case concealed important impeachment material from the defense. In addition, the district court found, and the court of appeals agreed, that Mr. Banks received ineffective assistance from his lawyer, at least in the penalty phase of his trial."
Banks, a black man, faced unjust odds from the beginning. There are shocking racial disparities in the way the death penalty is being administered in the United States. A recent Amnesty International Report entitled Death by Discrimination confirmed many people’s suspicions and previous studies assessing the racial bias in the death penalty.
- Blacks are six to seven times more likely to be executed than whites although whites and blacks are murder victims at about the same rate.
- 80 percent of the people put to death in the United States had white victims.
- 13 percent of the people put to death in the United States had black victims.
- In a study by Columbia University in June of 2000 entitled "A Broken System" it was discovered that there was a prejudicial error in 68 percent of the cases. That results in 7 out of 10 people given the death sentence could have had their charges reversed.
- One in five blacks executed was convicted by a jury with no black jurors.
