A new study on Missouri's executions shows a need to suspend them "so that a full investigation into systemic bias can be conducted," the Missourians Against the Death Penalty said Thursday.
The nine-page study said "Missouri's use of the death penalty in the modern era has been marked by substantial disparities by the race and gender of the victim of the crime, and by geography."
Using U.S. Department of Justice statistics, University of North Carolina political scientist Frank R. Baumgartner looked at Missouri executions for murders committed since 1976, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled states could resume executions after a decade-long, court-imposed ban.
Among his findings in "The Impact of Race, Gender, and Geography on Missouri Executions," Baumgartner determined:
• A person convicted of homicide in St. Louis County is three times more likely to be executed than if they were convicted of the same crime in the vast majority of Missouri's other counties - and 13 times more likely to be executed than if they were convicted of the same crime in the neighboring City of St. Louis.
• A majority of the state's 80 executions that occurred between 1976 and 2014 come from just three of the state's 114 counties and St. Louis City. His report listed those as St. Louis, 31 executions (combining St. Louis County's 23 and St. Louis City's 8); Jackson County, 8; and Callaway County, 5.
• Homicides committed in Callaway, Schuyler and Moniteau counties are 30 to 70 times more likely to result in an execution than homicides committed in the vast majority of the state's counties.
In an email to the News Tribune, Baumgartner said his statistics were based on the county where the conviction and sentence occurred, not the location of the crime.
"I don't have at my fingers how many of the 80 Missouri executions involved a change of venue," he wrote, "but I would suspect the number to be relatively low. But you are correct that this would be a cause for slight differences in the calculations."
Other findings in Baumgartner's report included:
• Homicides involving white victims are seven times more likely to result in an execution than those involving black victims.
• Homicides involving white female victims are nearly 14 times more likely to result in an execution than those involving black male victims.
• Even though white victims are less than 40 percent of all murder victims in Missouri, 81 percent of those executed in the state were convicted of killing white victims.
• Even though the vast majority of murders involve an offender and victim(s) of the same race, 54 percent of the African-American men executed by Missouri were convicted of crimes involving white victims.
Baumgartner said his findings were based on a comparison of all homicides and all executions. The study did not take into account whether prosecutors charged first-degree murder and didn't seek the death penalty, or sought the death penalty but had a jury recommend life-without-parole instead.
Nor did his statistics differentiate between charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter, for which the death penalty would not be an option under Missouri law.
"My main point to you would be that this is a comprehensive analysis of every execution in the modern history of the state," Baumgartner wrote, "compared with a similarly complete review of all homicides.
"There could be small details that would cause a movement one way or another, but the point I try to make in the paper is that there are very stark trends and patterns here that seriously call into question how equitably the death penalty is carried out, in practice."