Given this ratio, South Carolina could argue it was not guilty of racism in the application of the death penalty. But all the victims in the cases that put those men on death row were white, save three. This same pattern held in other death penalty states. In Illinois, when the victim was white, it was three times more likely that the defendant would receive the death sentence than if the victim was black. Altogether, across the country, in cases where a person was executed, more than three-quarters of the victims were white. Elmore’s lawyers appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court, which appointed a thirty-four-year-old prematurely gray lawyer of quiet brilliance, David Bruck, to represent him. It was Elmore’s first break. “Almost Gandhiesque” was how a South Carolina prosecutor described Bruck to David Stout, author of Carolina Skeletons, a fictional account of South Carolina’s execution of George Stinney, the fourteen-year-old put to death after a trial that took only seven hours.
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