NCJ Number
153844
Date Published
1992
Length
13 pages
Annotation
Although Philadelphia courts generously dispense the death sentence, the city does not have sufficient money to provide a quality defense for indigent defendants charged with a capital crime; this "cheap justice" is compounded by the tendency to send a disproportionate number of African-Americans to death row.
Abstract
There are more than 140 people under sentence of death in Pennsylvania. With less than 15 percent of the State's population, Philadelphia accounts for more than half of the State's condemned prisoners. The two counties with the State's largest cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, send vastly different numbers of people to death row. Philadelphia, however, has no organized defense system to provide training or support to defend capital cases. In a city on the verge of economic collapse such as Philadelphia, resources provided for attorneys to mount the most difficult of all criminal defenses are woefully inadequate. Only about 80 lawyers in a city with 8,000 lawyers both qualify and are willing to represent capitally charged defendants, because to undertake such cases is to agree to work for little or nothing and not to be paid for months or years. The District Attorney's Office seeks the death penalty in well over 50 percent of all homicides. Also, the use of peremptory challenges to prospective jurors by the District Attorney, coupled with the bias some judges have exhibited on behalf of the state, has resulted not just in a disproportionate number of African-Americans sentenced to death, but an absolute majority of blacks over whites on death row. When justice is defined differently for the poor than for the rest of society, justice ceases to be a vaunted principle and becomes instead an empty slogan.