Abstract
In At the Cross, University of Kentucky Law Professor Melynda J. Price asks an interesting and previously overlooked question: How do African Americans understand the death penalty and its relationship to their inclusion as full citizens, and how is this understanding informed by religion and their experiences and perceptions of discrimination? Polls consistently find that African Americans are less supportive of the death penalty than Whites are. Most scholars assume this reflects the discriminatory nature in which the penalty is applied, but Price is more interested in how African Americans mobilize their religious beliefs and conceptualize their relationship to the state in order to reach a position on the death penalty. She wisely employs multiple methodologies in her attempt to answer this question and strategically selects Houston as her research site. Houston is located in Harris County, which is the epicenter of capital punishment in America. No county in America—and only two states (Virginia and Texas)—has sent more defendants to the death chamber than Harris County. Therefore, as Price points out, Houston residents are “profoundly familiar with the death penalty” and the penalty forms “a meaningful part of the criminal justice system” for Houstonians (p. 11).
In Chapter 1, Price analyzes the media coverage surrounding the executions of Gary Graham, a Black man whose guilt was (and is) very much in doubt, and Karla Faye Tucker, a White woman who repeatedly admitted her guilt. She selected these two cases because they generated a great deal of media attention and public outcry, both defendants claimed to have experienced a religious conversion, and the defendants were of different races and genders. In the second chapter, Price explores the rationales used by prosecutors for excluding Blacks from capital jury service in Batson hearings, which are designed to prevent prosecutors from exercising their peremptory challenges in a racially discriminatory fashion, and how these rationales relate to the exclusion of Blacks from full citizenship. In Chapter 3, she utilizes several years of the Houston Area Survey to explore the way religion, experiences of personal discrimination, and feelings of group discrimination correlate with African Americans’ views on the death penalty. In Chapters 4 and 5, the analysis shifts to focus groups in order to better understand the legal consciousness (or commonsense understandings of the law) of African Americans as it relates to the death penalty, race, religion, and African Americans’ feelings of belonging.
Price reaches some interesting and intriguing conclusions regarding the relationship between African Americans and the state. Overall, she finds that African Americans have not yet been fully incorporated “into the larger legal and political community of the nation” (p. 141). This is not an especially new or surprising finding, but what is interesting about her work is the way she weaves together multiple methodologies to explore the different ways the death penalty communicates this exclusion to African Americans. Through the different rhetoric used to describe Graham and Tucker, the way prosecutors succeeded in excluding potential African American capital jurors, the feelings of shared fate and group discrimination, and the message that Black lives do not matter that many African Americans receive from the death penalty, she deftly illustrates how the death penalty connects to the larger body politic to curtail the citizenship rights of African Americans. She also indicts the Supreme Court for “permitting and affirming the continued exclusion of African Americans from the community of citizens who are protected from the excesses of the state” and, through precedent, continuing to “exclude the policy preferences of African Americans” (pp. 144–145). Therefore, this book helps to illuminate the feelings African Americans have toward the criminal justice system and the state and to put their reactions to discrete events—like the killing of Michael Brown—into larger perspective. For many within the African American community, these actions—like the death penalty—are just a continuous thread of state violence against African Americans designed to keep them in their place.
Although Price’s conclusions are interesting and in accordance with what one would expect, they are not entirely convincing. She only compares the news coverage of two defendants, which makes it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions. Furthermore, as Price admits, the statistical analysis she offers in Chapter 3 is very rudimentary and could be more sophisticated, and the focus groups she utilized in Chapters 4 and 5 only included a total of 21 participants (it is not clear how many total focus groups there were), who were selected using a snowball sampling technique, and only 4 of the participants were male. While qualitative studies include far fewer research subjects than quantitative ones, the incredibly small sample size (clustered into even fewer focus groups) calls into question the generalizability of the findings in these chapters. Lastly, while Price’s conclusions are sensible, they are not fully supported by the data she presents.
Despite these criticisms, Price’s book offers up a new research direction into the ways race, religion, and the death penalty intersect to inform views on citizenship while providing some insight into the ways African Americans feel excluded. Future research could look at this question in greater depth and with different racial or ethnic groups in different parts of the country. The book is also written in very accessible language so that members of the general public would be able make sense of the findings. However, the analytic strategy and data presentation are clearly targeted at an academic audience. This book would probably not be appropriate for an undergraduate class but would be a good addition to a graduate course on racial inequality or the death penalty. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary approach makes the book relevant to scholars in numerous fields including sociology, criminology, political science, and law, especially those with research interests in race, citizenship, juries, capital punishment, social control, or religion.