Gregory Russeau will be executed tomorrow. He is black. His victim was white.

This will be the 9th execution so far this year in TX. 7 of the nine have been Latino or black. In this particular case, counsel was sub-par and perhaps incommpetent. But that isn't my point, horrifying and common as that is. My point is that the DP is the most racist institution in America. I'm against the DP in every instance, but even if you aren't, this institutional racism should be enough for any liberal to oppose it. Furthermore, I'll argue that you can't be truly for criminal justice reform if you don't tackle this issue.

Here's a bit about the case:

On Thursday, June 18, the state of Texas plans to execute Gregory Russeau, a 45-year-old Tyler man, convicted in Oct. 2002 of killing 75-year-old James Syvertson in his auto shop's garage on May 30, 2001.

Russeau was found guilty of capital murder after jurors deliberated for less than an hour. He argued, after his conviction, that he was found guilty because his attorney Clifton Roberson fumbled his handling of witnesses and failed to argue that law enforcement planted evidence (two hairs belonging to Russeau found on a bottle) at the crime scene. Those concerns were raised in subsequent petitions for writ of habeas corpus filed by Jeffrey Haas.

Haas, it should be said, had his own issues. As a petition for relief filed in 2012 by Carlo D'Angelo notes: "Both the 2004 and 2009 petitions for habeas corpus that Mr. Haas filed in the state district court contained no claims that were based upon any evidence or the result of any investigation that occurred outside of the Clerk's Record and trial transcript in either of the Petitioner's cases, thus indicating that Mr. Haas did virtually nothing to investigate the facts pertaining to the actions of trial and appellate counsel, potential mitigation, and potential prosecutorial misconduct and withholding of evidence."

The trial court held an evidentiary hearing on Dec. 2, 2004, during which Roberson and his co-counsel Brandon Baade testified to the competence of their representation of Russeau. Six months later, in June 2005, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued an opinion that upheld Russeau's conviction but remanded the case back to trial for a new sentencing. There, he was represented – once again – by Roberson and Baade, the two attorneys who failed to properly represent him in the first place, and whom Russeau specifically asked the court to not appoint for the second hearing (on the grounds that Roberson and Baade had waived the attorney-client privilege when they testified at the hearing.)

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http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2015-06-12/death-watch-ninth-execution-slated-for-june-18/

Here is information about how terribly racist the Death Penalty is:

The racial bias of the US death penalty

The application of the US death penalty is unfair, arbitrary and racially biased. Whether a defendant receives a death sentence depends not on the merits of the case, so much as on his or her skin colour – and the race of the victim – and the county in which the murder case was prosecuted. Two recent news items in the US provide some illustrative context.

First, the issue of bias: the North Carolina Senate recently approved Senate Bill 9, a measure that would repeal the state's Racial Justice Act. The act, signed into law by Governor Bev Purdue in 2009, allows inmates to challenge their death sentences through statistical evidence of racial bias, including the exclusion of blacks from juries. Republican lawmakers and prosecutors opposed the law.

Fortunately, the governor vetoed SB9, which would have required prosecutors to openly confess to racism. This would have made it far more difficult for prisoners to prove racial discrimination in their sentence, despite evidence such as a study of North Carolina which found that defendants whose victims were white were 3.5 times more likely to receive a death sentence.

Second, the geographical anomalies: an analysis by the Houston Chronicle found that 12 of the last 13 people condemned to death in Harris County, Texas were black. After Texas itself, Harris County is the national leader in its number of executions. Over one third of Texas's 305 death row inmates – and half of the state's 121 black death row prisoners – are from Harris County. One of those African Americans, Duane Buck, was sentenced based on the testimony of an expert psychologist who maintained that blacks are prone to violence. In 2008, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal resigned after sending an email message titled "fatal overdose", featuring a photo of a black man lying on the ground surrounded by watermelons and a bucket of chicken.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/03/racial-bias-us-death-penalty