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Prison officials in Huntsville, Texas are preparing the death chamber for the state's 500th execution in the modern era, in this case of an African American woman who claims her trial was tainted by blatant racial discrimination.
Kimberly McCarthy, 52, has just hours to live as her lawyer attempts to persuade the courts to stay her execution scheduled for 6pm CDT Wednesday. On Tuesday night the court of criminal appeals of Texas declined to hear her appeal on grounds that the prisoner had exhausted all legal options to avoid death.
McCarthy's lawyer, Maurie Levin, was scathing about the appeal court dismissal, criticising the judges for being more concerned about "form over substance" even when a life was at stake. Levin, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the court's decision meant McCarthy would be executed "despite the fact that her conviction and death sentence were the result of a process that was infected by discrimination and race bias, and inadequate counsel appointed by the state. She will be executed despite the fact that no court has ever reviewed the merits of those claims."
Should McCarthy's execution go ahead the grim landmark of 500 executions since the death penalty resumed in 1976 following a supreme court review will confirm Texas's dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings. The state with the second most enthusiastic record for killing prisoners, Virginia, falls far behind with just 110 executions in the modern period.
McCarthy was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of her neighbour, Dorothy Booth, a retired college professor aged 71. McCarthy was at the time a crack addict and committed the stabbing during a robbery.
Her guilt has never been contested, but Levin has challenged the death sentence on grounds that she was consistently poorly represented by lawyers appointed by the state and that the jury at her trial that meted out the death penalty was racially manipulated. The case was racially charged from the start as McCarthy is black and her victim was white.
Of the 12 members of the jury, only one was black, despite the fact that almost a quarter of the population of Dallas County where the trial took place are African American. McCarthy's appeal for a stay of execution provides evidence that prosecutors consciously distorted the racial composition of the jury by rejecting three of the four non-whites who made it through to the final jury selection.
As the execution approaches, McCarthy's legal options will begin to close. Her last chance might be an appeal to the US supreme court, the highest judicial panel in the land, though it will take a powerful argument to convince the nine justices to consider the case.
Failing all legal intervention, McCarthy will be administered a massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital in a single lethal injection.
• This article was amended on 26 June to correct McCarthy's scheduled execution to Wednesday, not Thursday.
Prison officials in Huntsville, Texas are preparing the death chamber for the state's 500th execution in the modern era, in this case of an African American woman who claims her trial was tainted by blatant racial discrimination.
Kimberly McCarthy, 52, has just hours to live as her lawyer attempts to persuade the courts to stay her execution scheduled for 6pm CDT Wednesday. On Tuesday night the court of criminal appeals of Texas declined to hear her appeal on grounds that the prisoner had exhausted all legal options to avoid death.
McCarthy's lawyer, Maurie Levin, was scathing about the appeal court dismissal, criticising the judges for being more concerned about "form over substance" even when a life was at stake. Levin, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the court's decision meant McCarthy would be executed "despite the fact that her conviction and death sentence were the result of a process that was infected by discrimination and race bias, and inadequate counsel appointed by the state. She will be executed despite the fact that no court has ever reviewed the merits of those claims."
Should McCarthy's execution go ahead the grim landmark of 500 executions since the death penalty resumed in 1976 following a supreme court review will confirm Texas's dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings. The state with the second most enthusiastic record for killing prisoners, Virginia, falls far behind with just 110 executions in the modern period.
McCarthy was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of her neighbour, Dorothy Booth, a retired college professor aged 71. McCarthy was at the time a crack addict and committed the stabbing during a robbery.
Her guilt has never been contested, but Levin has challenged the death sentence on grounds that she was consistently poorly represented by lawyers appointed by the state and that the jury at her trial that meted out the death penalty was racially manipulated. The case was racially charged from the start as McCarthy is black and her victim was white.
Of the 12 members of the jury, only one was black, despite the fact that almost a quarter of the population of Dallas County where the trial took place are African American. McCarthy's appeal for a stay of execution provides evidence that prosecutors consciously distorted the racial composition of the jury by rejecting three of the four non-whites who made it through to the final jury selection.
As the execution approaches, McCarthy's legal options will begin to close. Her last chance might be an appeal to the US supreme court, the highest judicial panel in the land, though it will take a powerful argument to convince the nine justices to consider the case.
Failing all legal intervention, McCarthy will be administered a massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital in a single lethal injection.
• This article was amended on 26 June to correct McCarthy's scheduled execution to Wednesday, not Thursday.
Deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century, according to new census data, a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change.
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The disparity was tiny — only about 12,000 — and was more than made up by a gain of 188,000 as a result of immigration from abroad. But the decrease for the year ending July 1, 2012, coupled with the fact that a majority of births in the United States are now to Hispanic, black and Asian mothers, is further evidence that white Americans will become a minority nationwide within about three decades.
Over all, the number of non-Hispanic white Americans is expected to begin declining by the end of this decade.
“These new census estimates are an early signal alerting us to the impending decline in the white population that will characterize most of the 21st century,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.
The transition will mean that “today’s racial and ethnic minorities will no longer be dependent on older whites for their economic well-being,” Dr. Frey said. In fact, the situation may be reversed. “It makes more vivid than ever the fact that we will be reliant on younger minorities and immigrants for our future demographic and economic growth,” he said.
The viability of programs like Social Security and Medicare, Dr. Frey said, “will be reliant on the success of waves of young Hispanics, Asians and blacks who will become the bulwark of our labor force.” The issues of minorities, he added, “will hold greater sway than ever before.”
In 2010, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, more non-Hispanic whites died than were born in 11 states, including California, Florida and Pennsylvania. White deaths exceeded births in a majority of counties, including Los Angeles, the most populous.
The disparity between deaths and births in the year that ended last July surprised experts. They expected that the aging white population would eventually shrink, as it has done in many European countries, but not for another decade or so.
Nationally, said Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute, a research center based at the University of New Hampshire, “the onset of natural decrease between 2011 and 2012 was not anticipated.” He attributed the precipitous shift in part to the recession, adding that “the growing number of older non-Hispanic whites, which will accelerate rapidly as the baby boom ages, guarantees that non-Hispanic white natural decrease will be a significant part of the nation’s demographic future.”
Professor Johnson said there were 320,000 more births than deaths among non-Hispanic whites in the year beginning July 2006, just before the recession. From 2010 to 2011, the natural increase among non-Hispanic whites had shrunk to 29,000.
Census Bureau estimates indicate that there were 1.9 million non-Hispanic white births in the year ending July 1, 2012, compared with 2.3 million from July 2006 to 2007 during the economic boom, a 13.3 percent decline. Non-Hispanic white deaths increased only modestly during the same period, by 1.6 percent.
The census population estimates released Thursday also affirmed that Asians were the fastest-growing major ethnic or racial group. Their ranks grew by 2.9 percent, or 530,000, with immigration from overseas accounting for 60 percent of that growth.
The Hispanic population grew by 2.2 percent, or more than 1.1 million, the most of any group, with 76 percent resulting from natural increase.
The non-Hispanic white population expanded by only 175,000, or 0.09 percent, and blacks by 559,000, or 1.3 percent.
The median age rose to 37.5 from 37.3, but the median declined in Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, North Dakota and Oklahoma. It ranged from 64.8 in Sumter, Fla., to 23 in Madison, Idaho.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg trotted out shopworn, discredited arguments this week while defending the constitutionally suspect police program under which hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been detained and questioned on the streets every year. His speech, at 1 Police Plaza, castigated civil rights lawyers who oppose what they say is the practice of stopping people based on race instead of reasonable suspicion; Democratic mayoral candidates who want to rein in the stop-and-frisk program; and the City Council, which is considering a perfectly reasonable bill that would create the position of Police Department inspector general, with broad powers to review department policies.
Related in Opinion
Taking Note: What Ray Kelly Said About Stop-and-Frisk (May 3, 2013)
Opinion Twitter Logo.
Connect With Us on Twitter
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
Mr. Bloomberg denied that police officers stop people based on race, adding that members of minority groups were more likely to be stopped because minorities committed most of the crimes. But court documents in the three federal lawsuits that are moving through the judicial system tell another story entirely.
The data in the case of Floyd v. City of New York, a class action being heard in federal court in Manhattan, show that in tens of thousands of cases, officers reported stopping people based on “furtive movement,” a meaningless term that cannot be legally used to justify a stop. Officers also reported that they had made stops in “high crime areas,” when, in fact, some of those areas were not. In many cases, officers said that they had stopped people based on a “suspicious bulge” — suggesting a gun — in their clothing. Yet, according to court documents, officers found only one gun for every 69 stops in which they cited a “bulge.” And guns were seized in only 0.15 percent of all stops.
In addition, only 5.4 percent of all stops resulted in an arrest, and about 6 percent led to a summons. This means that in nearly 90 percent of cases, the citizens who were stopped were doing nothing illegal. In some cases, prosecutors declined to automatically prosecute arrests made in connection with the program because they knew that the stops were illegal.
Mr. Bloomberg’s suggestion that the program has been responsible for historic drops in crime is also implausible. Crime has declined all over the country, including in places that have not used New York’s aggressively invasive techniques. Besides, if crime rates and street stops had a strong correlation, the murder rate would have gone up in 2012, when stops declined by about 20 percent. In fact, the murder rate fell in 2012 to an all-time low.
Mr. Bloomberg’s implication that the program’s critics are more interested in vexing City Hall than in keeping the streets clear of murderers was especially reprehensible. No one is opposed to using effective, constitutional means of fighting crime. The problem is that over the last decade the Police Department has shown utter contempt for Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. And worse, these tactics have been used largely against young black and Hispanic men.
Mr. Bloomberg may never change his views. But his stubborn refusal to see the program’s dangers has not stopped three civil rights lawsuits from going forward in federal court and the City Council from trying to curb the use of tactics that have alienated minority communities from the police and made law-abiding citizens feel like criminals in their own neighborhoods.
Kimberly McCarthy, 52, has just hours to live as her lawyer attempts to persuade the courts to stay her execution scheduled for 6pm CDT Wednesday. On Tuesday night the court of criminal appeals of Texas declined to hear her appeal on grounds that the prisoner had exhausted all legal options to avoid death.
McCarthy's lawyer, Maurie Levin, was scathing about the appeal court dismissal, criticising the judges for being more concerned about "form over substance" even when a life was at stake. Levin, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the court's decision meant McCarthy would be executed "despite the fact that her conviction and death sentence were the result of a process that was infected by discrimination and race bias, and inadequate counsel appointed by the state. She will be executed despite the fact that no court has ever reviewed the merits of those claims."
Should McCarthy's execution go ahead the grim landmark of 500 executions since the death penalty resumed in 1976 following a supreme court review will confirm Texas's dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings. The state with the second most enthusiastic record for killing prisoners, Virginia, falls far behind with just 110 executions in the modern period.
McCarthy was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of her neighbour, Dorothy Booth, a retired college professor aged 71. McCarthy was at the time a crack addict and committed the stabbing during a robbery.
Her guilt has never been contested, but Levin has challenged the death sentence on grounds that she was consistently poorly represented by lawyers appointed by the state and that the jury at her trial that meted out the death penalty was racially manipulated. The case was racially charged from the start as McCarthy is black and her victim was white.
Of the 12 members of the jury, only one was black, despite the fact that almost a quarter of the population of Dallas County where the trial took place are African American. McCarthy's appeal for a stay of execution provides evidence that prosecutors consciously distorted the racial composition of the jury by rejecting three of the four non-whites who made it through to the final jury selection.
As the execution approaches, McCarthy's legal options will begin to close. Her last chance might be an appeal to the US supreme court, the highest judicial panel in the land, though it will take a powerful argument to convince the nine justices to consider the case.
Failing all legal intervention, McCarthy will be administered a massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital in a single lethal injection.
• This article was amended on 26 June to correct McCarthy's scheduled execution to Wednesday, not Thursday.
Prison officials in Huntsville, Texas are preparing the death chamber for the state's 500th execution in the modern era, in this case of an African American woman who claims her trial was tainted by blatant racial discrimination.
Kimberly McCarthy, 52, has just hours to live as her lawyer attempts to persuade the courts to stay her execution scheduled for 6pm CDT Wednesday. On Tuesday night the court of criminal appeals of Texas declined to hear her appeal on grounds that the prisoner had exhausted all legal options to avoid death.
McCarthy's lawyer, Maurie Levin, was scathing about the appeal court dismissal, criticising the judges for being more concerned about "form over substance" even when a life was at stake. Levin, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the court's decision meant McCarthy would be executed "despite the fact that her conviction and death sentence were the result of a process that was infected by discrimination and race bias, and inadequate counsel appointed by the state. She will be executed despite the fact that no court has ever reviewed the merits of those claims."
Should McCarthy's execution go ahead the grim landmark of 500 executions since the death penalty resumed in 1976 following a supreme court review will confirm Texas's dubious distinction of being the undisputed champion of judicial killings. The state with the second most enthusiastic record for killing prisoners, Virginia, falls far behind with just 110 executions in the modern period.
McCarthy was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of her neighbour, Dorothy Booth, a retired college professor aged 71. McCarthy was at the time a crack addict and committed the stabbing during a robbery.
Her guilt has never been contested, but Levin has challenged the death sentence on grounds that she was consistently poorly represented by lawyers appointed by the state and that the jury at her trial that meted out the death penalty was racially manipulated. The case was racially charged from the start as McCarthy is black and her victim was white.
Of the 12 members of the jury, only one was black, despite the fact that almost a quarter of the population of Dallas County where the trial took place are African American. McCarthy's appeal for a stay of execution provides evidence that prosecutors consciously distorted the racial composition of the jury by rejecting three of the four non-whites who made it through to the final jury selection.
As the execution approaches, McCarthy's legal options will begin to close. Her last chance might be an appeal to the US supreme court, the highest judicial panel in the land, though it will take a powerful argument to convince the nine justices to consider the case.
Failing all legal intervention, McCarthy will be administered a massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital in a single lethal injection.
• This article was amended on 26 June to correct McCarthy's scheduled execution to Wednesday, not Thursday.
Deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century, according to new census data, a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change.
National Twitter Logo.
Connect With Us on Twitter
Follow @NYTNational for breaking news and headlines.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
The disparity was tiny — only about 12,000 — and was more than made up by a gain of 188,000 as a result of immigration from abroad. But the decrease for the year ending July 1, 2012, coupled with the fact that a majority of births in the United States are now to Hispanic, black and Asian mothers, is further evidence that white Americans will become a minority nationwide within about three decades.
Over all, the number of non-Hispanic white Americans is expected to begin declining by the end of this decade.
“These new census estimates are an early signal alerting us to the impending decline in the white population that will characterize most of the 21st century,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.
The transition will mean that “today’s racial and ethnic minorities will no longer be dependent on older whites for their economic well-being,” Dr. Frey said. In fact, the situation may be reversed. “It makes more vivid than ever the fact that we will be reliant on younger minorities and immigrants for our future demographic and economic growth,” he said.
The viability of programs like Social Security and Medicare, Dr. Frey said, “will be reliant on the success of waves of young Hispanics, Asians and blacks who will become the bulwark of our labor force.” The issues of minorities, he added, “will hold greater sway than ever before.”
In 2010, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, more non-Hispanic whites died than were born in 11 states, including California, Florida and Pennsylvania. White deaths exceeded births in a majority of counties, including Los Angeles, the most populous.
The disparity between deaths and births in the year that ended last July surprised experts. They expected that the aging white population would eventually shrink, as it has done in many European countries, but not for another decade or so.
Nationally, said Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute, a research center based at the University of New Hampshire, “the onset of natural decrease between 2011 and 2012 was not anticipated.” He attributed the precipitous shift in part to the recession, adding that “the growing number of older non-Hispanic whites, which will accelerate rapidly as the baby boom ages, guarantees that non-Hispanic white natural decrease will be a significant part of the nation’s demographic future.”
Professor Johnson said there were 320,000 more births than deaths among non-Hispanic whites in the year beginning July 2006, just before the recession. From 2010 to 2011, the natural increase among non-Hispanic whites had shrunk to 29,000.
Census Bureau estimates indicate that there were 1.9 million non-Hispanic white births in the year ending July 1, 2012, compared with 2.3 million from July 2006 to 2007 during the economic boom, a 13.3 percent decline. Non-Hispanic white deaths increased only modestly during the same period, by 1.6 percent.
The census population estimates released Thursday also affirmed that Asians were the fastest-growing major ethnic or racial group. Their ranks grew by 2.9 percent, or 530,000, with immigration from overseas accounting for 60 percent of that growth.
The Hispanic population grew by 2.2 percent, or more than 1.1 million, the most of any group, with 76 percent resulting from natural increase.
The non-Hispanic white population expanded by only 175,000, or 0.09 percent, and blacks by 559,000, or 1.3 percent.
The median age rose to 37.5 from 37.3, but the median declined in Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, North Dakota and Oklahoma. It ranged from 64.8 in Sumter, Fla., to 23 in Madison, Idaho.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg trotted out shopworn, discredited arguments this week while defending the constitutionally suspect police program under which hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been detained and questioned on the streets every year. His speech, at 1 Police Plaza, castigated civil rights lawyers who oppose what they say is the practice of stopping people based on race instead of reasonable suspicion; Democratic mayoral candidates who want to rein in the stop-and-frisk program; and the City Council, which is considering a perfectly reasonable bill that would create the position of Police Department inspector general, with broad powers to review department policies.
Related in Opinion
Taking Note: What Ray Kelly Said About Stop-and-Frisk (May 3, 2013)
Opinion Twitter Logo.
Connect With Us on Twitter
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
Mr. Bloomberg denied that police officers stop people based on race, adding that members of minority groups were more likely to be stopped because minorities committed most of the crimes. But court documents in the three federal lawsuits that are moving through the judicial system tell another story entirely.
The data in the case of Floyd v. City of New York, a class action being heard in federal court in Manhattan, show that in tens of thousands of cases, officers reported stopping people based on “furtive movement,” a meaningless term that cannot be legally used to justify a stop. Officers also reported that they had made stops in “high crime areas,” when, in fact, some of those areas were not. In many cases, officers said that they had stopped people based on a “suspicious bulge” — suggesting a gun — in their clothing. Yet, according to court documents, officers found only one gun for every 69 stops in which they cited a “bulge.” And guns were seized in only 0.15 percent of all stops.
In addition, only 5.4 percent of all stops resulted in an arrest, and about 6 percent led to a summons. This means that in nearly 90 percent of cases, the citizens who were stopped were doing nothing illegal. In some cases, prosecutors declined to automatically prosecute arrests made in connection with the program because they knew that the stops were illegal.
Mr. Bloomberg’s suggestion that the program has been responsible for historic drops in crime is also implausible. Crime has declined all over the country, including in places that have not used New York’s aggressively invasive techniques. Besides, if crime rates and street stops had a strong correlation, the murder rate would have gone up in 2012, when stops declined by about 20 percent. In fact, the murder rate fell in 2012 to an all-time low.
Mr. Bloomberg’s implication that the program’s critics are more interested in vexing City Hall than in keeping the streets clear of murderers was especially reprehensible. No one is opposed to using effective, constitutional means of fighting crime. The problem is that over the last decade the Police Department has shown utter contempt for Fourth Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. And worse, these tactics have been used largely against young black and Hispanic men.
Mr. Bloomberg may never change his views. But his stubborn refusal to see the program’s dangers has not stopped three civil rights lawsuits from going forward in federal court and the City Council from trying to curb the use of tactics that have alienated minority communities from the police and made law-abiding citizens feel like criminals in their own neighborhoods.
