Since 1977, the overwhelming majority of death row defendants (80%) have been executed for killing white victims, although whites make up only 50% percent of all homicide victims. In a 1990 report, the non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office found “a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty.”

A North Carolina study, based on data from 502 murders occurring between 1993 and 1997 found that defendants whose victims are white are 3.5 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those with non-white victims. Underlying the statistical evidence is the differential treatment of African-Americans at every turn:

• All of Tennessee’s District Attorneys General are white. These are the people who decide whether or not to seek the death penalty. ("Prosecutors, more than any other officials in the system, have the power, discretion, and responsibility to remedy the discriminatory treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice process." [MORE]) 
• African Americans make up 43% of Tennessee’s death row population but only 17% of its total population. [MORE]

From [HERE] A recent maneuver out of the state attorney general’s office in Tennessee is being called unprecedented after officials there asked the Supreme Court for permission to execute 10 prisoners currently on death row.

Those ten inmates have been awaiting execution an average of more than 27 years, but the state put a hold on the practice of putting prisoners to death in 2011 after it was forced to surrender its supply of sodium thiopental, a sedative that had up until then been one of three components used in the lethal cocktail administered by executioners in Tennessee.

Just this September, though, the Tennessee Department of Correction announced it would be switching to a single-drug lethal injection method, relying instead on just one narcotic, pentobarbital, which had been used primarily by veterinarians up until recently when other states began administering it to death row inmates.

The use of pentobarbital as the sole drug of choice at executions across the United States has generated a fair share of criticism and safety concerns in recent years, but it isn’t the narcotic that’s now raising questions in Tennessee. Rather, officials are being asked to explain why for the first time presumably ever they’ve ordered at once death warrants for 10 separate individuals.