US: On March 12th the US Supreme Court stopped Texas from executing its 300th inmate since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1977, writes Conor O'Clery in New York.
The stay came almost too late. Delma Banks had eaten his last meal and was just 10 minutes away from being killed by the state.
Mr Banks, who is black, claims he was wrongly convicted by an all white jury of the murder 23 years ago of a 16-year-old white youth, Richard Wayne Whitehead.
The case of Delma Banks, who is in all probability innocent, dramatically highlights a new report yesterday from Amnesty International on race and capital punishment in the US.
The report, which renews Amnesty's call for the end of capital punishment, states that blacks and whites are victims of murder in almost equal numbers in the US, but 80 per cent of the more than 840 people executed since judicial killing resumed in 1977 were put to death for murders involving white victims.
Most murders involve perpetrators and victims of the same race, yet nearly 200 blacks have been executed for the murder of white victims, 15 times as many as the number of whites put to death for killing blacks, and at least twice as many as the number of blacks executed for the murder of other blacks.
African Americans account for 12 per cent of the population, but make up more than 40 per cent of inmates on death row and one in three of those executed. One in four blacks put to death for killing whites was tried in front of all-white juries. Regularly, prosecutors dismiss minority jurors, death penalty opponents are kept off capital juries and grossly incompetent defence lawyers are assigned to black defendants.
In the case of Delma Banks, who had no prior criminal record and has always protested his innocence, the defence at his 1980 trial was poor and prosecutors improperly kept blacks off the jury, according to the submission made by three former federal judges on his behalf to the Supreme Court. The two key witnesses were drug addicts who had incentives to testify against him. Both have since recanted.
The claims raised in the appeal "go to the very heart of the effective functioning of the capital punishment system", said one of the three judges, former FBI Director William Sessions.
Despite the serious flaws in the trial, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to block Banks' execution, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles would not hear his plea. The problem is not confined to Texas. In Maryland a moratorium on executions was declared last year in the light of an academic study showing that those who kill whites are more likely to receive a death sentence, though a bill to make the moratorium permanent has been defeated in the Maryland Senate.
Amnesty accused the Bush administration of a "manifest failure of human rights leadership" in allowing federal executions to resume in 2001 "having failed to explain racial disparities in federal capital sentencing".
The continuing resort by the US to judicial killing "gives the lie to its self-proclaimed status as global human rights champion", Amnesty stated.
The report recommends the death penalty in the US be halted as it "remains" an act of racial injustice as well as an inherently cruel and degrading punishment.
In a global survey of capital punishment, Amnesty said that during 2002 records showed that over 1,526 people were executed in 31 countries and over 3,248 sentenced to death in 67 countries. It believes the true figures are higher as some countries like China refuse to publish statistics.
Amnesty praised the formation of the World Coalition against the Death Penalty, comprising trade unions, bar associations, local and regional governments and human rights organisations, and urged all countries to "get rid of this barbaric punishment forever".