Moratorium on Capital Punishment

212th General Assembly (2000) Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) There is strong evidence that the death penalty is applied in a racist manner. In 1987, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the United States Supreme Court refused to act on data demonstrating the continuing reality of racial bias. Justice William Brennan in his dissenting opinion said: It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined. (McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 344 (1987) [Brennan, J. Dissenting]) In 1990, the United States General Accounting Office reported a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty.