Sixty percent of the states do not have
a single elected black prosecutor
White men make up the majority of prosecutors in the United States, according to a study funded and published by the Women Donors Network.
The study found that 95 percent of the prosecutors elected in the U.S. are White; 79 percent of whom are White men. It also revealed that more than 60 percent of the country’s 50 states do not have a single elected Black prosecutor.
“Of the 2,437 elected prosecutors serving around the country, which includes officials at the state and local levels, just 61 are Black,” The Slate Group reported.
Slate said recent media focus has been between politicians, police targeting minorities, “and laws that impose harsh mandatory sentences on nonviolent drug offenders.”
Power in the American justice system rests with prosecutors; the result is “systemic bias,” Slate stated.
“Americans are taking a new look at the relationship between race, gender and criminal justice — in the failures to indict police officers from Ferguson to Staten Island, the rogue prosecutions of women who terminated their pregnancies from Indiana to Idaho, and in the epidemic of mass incarceration,” said Donna Hall, president and CEO of the Women Donors Network.
A similar perspective was presented by The New York Times in July: “Prosecutors decide in most criminal cases whether to bring charges. And, because so many criminal cases end in plea bargains, they (prosecutors) have a direct hand in deciding how long defendants spend behind bars.”
Slate noted: “The American criminal justice system is under intense scrutiny for its role in crippling Black communities through mass incarceration.”
The women’s network study concluded many prosecutors are elected in “down-ballot” races held in off-year elections, where there is a low voter turnout.
A recent study revealed that 85 percent of all incumbent prosecutors run for office unopposed, according to Ronald Wright, a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law.
“What this shows us is that, in the context of a growing crisis that we all recognize in criminal justice in this country, we have a system where incredible power and discretion is concentrated in the hands of one demographic group,” said Brenda Choresi Carter of the women’s network who led the study.
According to Justice for All data, of 57 counties counted in California (which has 58 counties) and the State Attorney General’s Office, 49 of the elected district attorneys in California are defined as White. The remaining eight are defined as Asian-American or Pacific Islander, Black or African-American, Hispanic or Latino, multiracial, and “two or more races.”
“I think most people know that we’ve had a significant problem with lack of diversity in decision-making roles in the criminal justice system for a long time,” said Bryan A. Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the book Just Mercy.
Federal prosecutors, who are appointed to office, were not included in the study.
The Women Donors Network is a philanthropic group of about 200 women. One of its focuses is on the race and gender of elected officials. The data, according to The New York Times, was compiled and analyzed by the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonpartisan group specializing in the aggregate of civic data sets.
