State lawmakers and civil rights leaders want legislation that enacts a mechanism to prevent racial inequality when imposing the death penalty.
Democratic legislators in the House and Senate have filed identical bills that would require the Missouri State Supreme Court to identify if race was a factor in a death penalty sentence during its review of capital punishment impositions. Current law states the Missouri Supreme Court must assess if the death penalty was imposed under the "influence of passion, prejudice or other arbitrary factor." The Racial Justice Act, the proposed legislation, would specifically add race into the court's consideration.
Rep. Brandon Ellington, D-Kansas City, the House sponsor of the bill, said the death sentence statistics of African Americans are "extremely scary," during a Monday press conference.
Cases in which the perpetrator is black and the victim is white leads to the most death penalty sentences in some U.S. jurisdictions, according the American Bar Association's 2012 Missouri Death Penalty Assessment Report. Though making up nearly 12 percent of Missouri's population, African Americans account for 40 percent of all executions in the state, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc.
Of those on death row, 19 are white and 10 are black.
"When we look at the sins of America, we have to make sure we're not re-instituting those sins," Ellington said. "I believe that we're doing that with our death penalty."
Jeremy Collins, a North Carolina-based civil rights lawyer and leader of the Moral Mondays Movement, said 60 percent of all those incarcerated in America are black, while the race group makes up nearly 12 percent of the U.S. population.
"We know that African Americans, in particular, are grossly disproportionately represented in mass incarceration in our criminal justice system," he said. "We know that communities of color are over policed across the country, particularly in the South where there are former slave-holding states. We know that when the research is done, people of color, particularly African Americans, make up sometimes three times their relative population in the incarcerated population."
Staci Pratt, state coordinator for Missourians Against the Death Penalty, said Missouri's prosecutors are not diverse - adding that nearly 80 percent are white males, 20 percent are white females and one prosecutor is black. There are no female prosecutors of color in Missouri, she said.
"In that situation, the subjective decision to seek the death penalty happens in a non-race neutral context," she said. "It's something that must change."
The batson challenge - which ensures potential jurors are not dismissed because of their race, ethnicity or sex - is in place to protect the jury selection process, but Pratt said no similar mechanism exists to examine race when imposing the death penalty.
"I also think it's very important that we acknowledge the deeply-rooted racist traditions that are a part of our criminal justice system, and they are institutional and systematic," she said.
"We need bills like (the Racial Justice Act) in order to address those concerns."
Rod Chapel, president of the Missouri NAACP and a Jefferson City-based lawyer, said the legislation is unique to Missouri and it's the first time being introduced to the General Assembly.