After 50 years of death row, resistance has never been stronger

(RNS) —  This week marks 50 years of the modern-era death penalty in the United States. In a 1972 landmark case, Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court called the death penalty “arbitrary and capricious.” But on July 2, 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court allowed executions to resume.

It was clear then, and now, that what determines who dies in America is not the atrocity of the crime but the resources of the defendant and the race of the victim. We may say that we need the death penalty for the “worst of the worst” — but the truth is we execute the poorest of the poor, and disproportionately, people of color.

Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has executed 1,670 people — by lethal injection, electrocution, gas, firing squad and hanging. We are one of only a handful of countries who still kills its own citizens to try to show that killing is wrong. And the death penalty is the descendent of racial terror and lynching. The states that held on to slavery the longest are the same states holding on to the death penalty. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is precisely where executions happen today. But there is good news in all of this.

When I was born in 1975, most of…