Today's News Scan notes that Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner is once again making the tired and obviously fallacious argument that simple percentages of the racial composition of death row somehow implies that the death penalty is administered discriminatorily. As we have noted many times on this blog, comparison of the percentage on death row with the general population is completely irrelevant because death row is for murderers, while the general population is almost all non-murderers.
As a crude first cut, we can easily compare the composition of death row with the composition of the population of known murderers. Those numbers are available in the very handy "Easy Access to the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports: 1980-2016" at https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezashr/
For Pennsylvania from 1980 to 2016, about 1/3 of homicides in which the perpetrator is known were committed by white perpetrators, a little less than 2/3 by black perpetrators, less than 1% each by American Indian and Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 1.4% where the race is not in the database. So the percentage of black murderers on Pennsylvania's death row (about half) is considerably less than the percentage of black murderers overall.
This is only a first cut because we don't know how many of the homicides are even legally eligible to be considered for the death penalty (called "aggravated murder" in Penn.) or the circumstances that make actual imposition of the penalty appropriate or not. More sophisticated studies along those lines, nationwide, have almost always come up with the result that no "race of defendant bias" can be demonstrated by the data. See my 2012 OSJCL article for details.
The October 2018 ruling by the Washington state supreme court striking down the state death penalty was also grounded on this slanderous argument.
The main actual explanation for the decision is that Washington state does not allow initiated constitutional amendments. The judges knew that their ukase will be immune from democratic scrutiny, contrary to what happened in 1972 in California.
Things are different in Pennsylvania. Though they also don’t have initiated constitutional amendments, the state legislature is strongly Republican, and can put to the people constitutional amendments by simple majority vote in each House.
Besides, the WA judges issued their order conveniently less than a month before general elections after the candidacy deadline. Only one of the three standing judges had an opponent, who raised no money for campaigning. But in Pennsylvania, which provides partisan elections for the state supreme court, this dodge may not work.