A new documentary exposes the racial biases in America’s death penalty cases, begging the question: What’s worse—the policy, or how it’s meted out?
Robert Tarver on death row.
Race to Execution, co-produced by Jim Lopes, focuses on two death-row inmates, Robert Tarver and Madison Hobley, whose cases are emblematic of larger systemic failures in the justice system. Both men stood before a jury of eleven whites and one black, and both were represented by an attorney who had never before tried a capital-murder case.
Since the 1980s, when Tarver and Hobley were convicted, the argument that capital punishment is riddled with bias has gained traction in the American public. Death sentences nationwide have declined almost 60 percent over the past seven years, as states halt executions and juries opt for life imprisonment. Race to Execution distills the moral anxiety behind this trend. As Andrea Lyon, Hobley’s appeals attorney (and sister of the director), argues in the film, “We execute the poorest of the poor, minorities, and people who had bad lawyers.”
Still, even those most closely involved in the documentary are divided on its implications. Lopes says that society must reserve the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. Director Rachel Lyon believes it should be abolished altogether, as does legal scholar Charles Ogletree, who narrates the film. After a screening at Harvard Law, Ogletree said, “If it’s broken, you’ve got to get rid of it. It’s not something you can fix. It has to be fair, or it can’t be at all.”
Lopes, an entertainment lawyer who has thought extensively about the media role in jury bias, argues that his colleagues must take greater responsibility for racialized depictions of crime. “The media affects jury selection; it affects how we perceive each other,” he explains. “You think you know your family, you think you know the people you work with—and everyone else is fill-in-the-blank with what you learn from news and the movies.”
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