On February 16, 2010 the State of Florida executed 45-year-old Martin Grossman for the murder of a wildlife officer in 1984. Grossman was the last person put to death in this country. It was a mundane execution, carried out against all the usual arguments opposing the death penalty.

            Three days later two separate juries in Harris County returned guilty verdicts in capital murder cases with recommendations that the defendants be sentenced to life without the benefit of parole. One of the defendants, Steven Torres, was part of a Mexican drug cartel who paid two contract killers $1500 each to kill a rival gang member. The contract killers walked into a Houston restaurant and gunned down an innocent civilian mistaking him for the contract target. One of the shooters, Michael Belmarez, pled guilty and received a 25 year sentence in exchange for his testimony against Torres.

            The defendant in the other murder case, Brian Ranard Davis, stabbed a 25-year-old woman repeatedly in the neck before pouring gasoline on her and setting her on fire. Harris County Assistant District Attorney Bill Hawkins told the jury: “You know she was alive and she burned to death. And she felt that in her last moments as she died by the side of the road.”

            Both Torres znd Davis were sentenced to life in prison without the benefit of parole.

            Grossman intended to kill the wildlife officer. He shot her in the back of the head. And there is no doubt that Torres and Davis intended for their victims to be killed as well. So why did Grossman die by lethal injection and Torres and Davis were given a chance to spend the rest of their lives in prison?

            I can think of at least two reasons. First, prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors determine which cases they will push for the death penalty. The prosecutors in the Torres/Davis cases obviously did not push too hard for the death penalty in those cases.

            And why was that? Well, that leads us to the second reason why Grossman was given the death penalty and Torres/Davis were not: race. The victim in the Torres contract killing was a Hispanic gentlemen setting in the restaurant having dinner with his family, and the victim in the Davis killing was an African-American woman who lived the street life and who had some kind of “beef” with Davis. But the victim in the Grossman case was a white woman who was a law enforcement officer, no less. Grossman was also white.

            It has historically been a nasty feature of homicide prosecutions that Hispanics killing Hispanics and blacks killing blacks do not warrant the death penalty like whites killing whites, especially when the victims are females and cops. On a prosecutor’s scale of justice, the lives of minority victims do not have the same human value as the lives of white victims. Prosecutors will deny this fact to the hilt but virtually every study about the death penalty reveals that race plays a critical role in determining who will and who will not die at the hands of the state.

            Juries tend to reflect the same sentiment as the Harris County juries did in the Torres/Davis cases.