U.S. Justice Has No Mercy

The nation’s justice system is broken and the Black community has a moral responsibility to aggressively lobby for change. Due to the mass incarceration of African Americans we must stand up and put a stop to the death penalty.

On June 29th 2015 the Supreme Court made a decision to uphold the use of lethal injection. This decision directly affects the African American people.

According to OKPolicy.org, the non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office found a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty. The study concluded that an African American defendant was several times more likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white.

According to the Innocence Project, it is estimated that between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of all U.S. prisoners are innocent. The American prison population is about 2.4 million. Using those numbers, as many as 120,000 innocent people could currently be in prison.

Although some Christians are in favor of capital punishment for the guilty, Scripture tells us that we must have mercy. Romans 5:20-21 “The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

The death penalty teaches retaliation and revenge and takes away the opportunity for us to exemplify grace and mercy. We as Christians in the African American community must lobby for laws to abolish this form of capital punishment for the future of our children and our children’s children and the generations to come.