Americas

Americas

US set to execute another African-American man

25 February 2014 23:28 (UTC +04:00)

Taylor, who was convicted for a 1989 murder, is due to be executed by injection in the state of Missouri at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday.

On Monday, a federal judge denied four motions filed on behalf of Taylor for a stay of execution.

Taylor's lawyers not only questioned Missouri's use of an unnamed compounding pharmacy to provide the pentobarbital for his execution but also expressed concerns that the state executes people before appeals are complete.

They also claimed that Taylor's original trial attorney was so overworked that she trapped him to plead guilty to lessen her own workload.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the racial ratio of the victims of the death penalty in the US has been striking since the revival of the practice in 1976, with the penalty being disproportionately imposed on ethnic minorities.

Statistics released by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice show that, 11 of the 16 executed prisoners in the state of Texas, which is responsible for nearly 40 percent of all executions in the US since 1976, were African American or Hispanic in 2013.

In an interview with Press TV on April 16, 2012, Malcolm X’s grandson, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, said that African Americans are murdered with impunity in the US because the system is unjust.

This happens because there is institutionalized racism in the United States, he added.

“The United States has more people incarcerated than anywhere else in the world. It has more people incarcerated than China, and China has the most people in the world,” he noted.

Shabazz stated that although a minority of the people of the United States are black, in prisons the majority of the people are black and Hispanic.

Shabazz was beaten to death in Mexico City on May 9, 2013. An autopsy found that the 28-year-old died of deadly blows to the head, face and torso.