09 August 2007 :

blacks convicted of killing whites are not only more likely than other killers to receive a death sentence – they are also more likely to actually be executed, a new study suggests.
But the findings showed that African Americans on death row for killing nonwhites are less likely to be executed than other condemned prisoners.
Examining who survives on death row is important because less than 10 % of those given the death sentence ever get executed.
Other research has shown that the great majority of those sentenced to death have their sentences overturned in appeal. But little is known about the factors that lead some condemned prisons to be executed.
There is more than a 2-fold greater risk that an African American who killed a white person will be executed than there is for a white person who killed a non-white victim.
Hispanics who killed whites were also more likely to be executed than were whites who killed non-whites, the study showed. But the risk of execution were not as strong for Hispanics who killed whites as they were for blacks who killed whites.
The study has been conducted by David Jacobs and Zhenchao Qian, professors of sociology at Ohio State University, Jason Carmichael of McGill University and Stephanie Kent of Cleveland State University. Their results appear in the August 2007 issue of the American Sociological Review.
The study examined outcomes of 1,560 people sentenced to death in 16 states from 1973 to 2002. These 16 states were chosen because they had the complete data that the researchers needed for the study.