It seems that in Louisiana, the death penalty is almost exclusively reserved for homicide cases in which the person killed is white. This was one of the major findings of a study that will appear in the fall issue of Loyola University New Orleans Journal of Public Interest Law.

Researchers Frank Baumgartner and Tim Lyman found that while 72 percent of the state’s homicide victims between 1976 and 2015 were black, only eight people (21 percent) were executed for killing a black person during that span. Meanwhile, while whites represent 26 percent of murder victims, their killers make up 79 percent of those executed. Breaking the numbers down by gender, the killer of a white woman is 48 times more likely to be executed than someone who kills a black man.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cited these very disparities in his dissenting opinion for Glossip V. Gross, in which he argued that the death penalty violates the Constitution. 

The authors conclude the report with the following: 

Any justification of the death penalty must involve equal protection. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that “no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Here we have a class of persons, the families and communities of murdered black males, so denied. 

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cited these very disparities in his dissenting opinion for Glossip V. Gross, in which he argued that the death penalty violates the Constitution.