9.
As examples above have shown, negative images on blacks that they are more likely to commit crimes are overly emphasized; thus, there are clearly higher chances for black people to be suspected for serious felons than for whites, which is now labeled as ˜driving while black' syndrome.10 The possible consequences of such can be an arousal of hassle and humiliation of police questioning for people being suspected and a lopsided number of blacks being arrested. The patterns of disproportionate arrests generate more extensive criminal histories for minorities and may influence sentencing outcomes of longer prison terms in average.
II. Disparity Depending on Victim's Race.
This part will cover some specific cases of death penalty followed by the criminal acts of murder. Of numerous studies of death penalty outcomes reviewed by the GAO, 82% found that imposition of the death penalty was more likely in the case of a white victim than in the case of a black victim.11 To give another example, defendants charged in Georgia with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty than defendants charged with killing black victims.12 The Baldus study also found that more than 50% of those sentenced to death for killing a white person would not have received the death penalty had they killed a black person.13 Although each state applies different laws to determine punishment that corresponds to the severity of each crime, with this statistic data above, it is clearly shown that racial disparity exists in the application of the death penalty when the victims are black.
While many evidences have already proved the unwarranted disparity in sentencing yielded by the race of the victims, same kind of cases combined with the conditions of defendants' race will result even more significant discrepancies. The Baldus study concluded that blacks who killed whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than blacks who killed blacks and seven times more frequently than whites who killed blacks.
