Murder, Minority Victims, and Mercy

Should the jury have acquitted George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin\u27s murder? Should enraged husbands receive a pass for killing their cheating wives? Should the law treat a homosexual advance as adequate provocation for killing? Criminal law scholars generally answer these questions with a resounding no. Theorists argue that criminal laws should not reflect bigoted perceptions of African Americans, women, and gays by permitting judges and jurors to treat those who kill racial and gender minorities with undue mercy. According to this view, murder defenses like provocation should be restricted to ensure that those who kill minority victims receive the harshest sanctions available. Equality is thus achieved by ratcheting up punishment. There is a similar bias in the application of the death penalty, where those who kill racial minorities receive more leniency than those who kill whites and are often spared execution. But the typical liberal response here is to call for abolition rather than more frequent executions. Equality is thus achieved by ratcheting down punishment. This Article asserts that the divergence between the accepted scholarly positions on the provocation defense and capital punishment can be explained by provocation critics\u27 choice to concentrate on spectacular individual instances of leniency toward those who kill gender minorities and death penalty theorists\u27 tendency to view the entire institution of capital punishment as racist and retrograde. The Article then provides the institutional sketch of noncapital murder law currently missing from provocation analysis by discussing sentencing practices, the demographic composition of murder defendants, and the provocation defense\u27s potential role as a safety valve. It concludes that inserting institutional analysis into the critical assessment of provocation might undermine the prevailing scholarly dogma supporting pro-prosecution reform