Ellis Cose

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel sentenced Dylann Roof to death, ending, at least for now, the saga of the troubled young man who walked into Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015, and shot nine parishioners dead.

Despite the odiousness and racist nature of Roof’s crime, black parishioners were not screaming for his blood. Instead, they offered forgiveness. Alana Simmons, the granddaughter of one of the victims, set the tone. “Hate won’t win,” she said. But despite Roof’s offer to plead guilty in exchange for life imprisonment, the Justice Department went to trial solely to get the death penalty.

It was an easy decision for the Justice Department, both because Roof’s crime was so egregious and because most Americans continue to support the death penalty, even though the level of support is lower than it has been in decades.

We have seen periods when support has ebbed. The most dramatic was in 1966. As the country struggled with an array of morally tinged issues, including the Vietnam War, support for capital punishment fell to 42%. Still, there never has been a time when most Americans stood in outright opposition to the death penalty.

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What is true of most Americans is emphatically untrue of its black communities. And that divide is nowhere more evident than with Roof.

A poll by Monique Lyle and Robert Oldendick of the University of South Carolina found that 65% of black Americans in South Carolina thought Roof should receive life without parole. In contrast, 64% of whites thought he should die. Those findings have less to do with Roof than with most blacks' opposition to the death penalty. Whereas 68% of whites favor the death penalty, according to Gallup, 39% of blacks favor it.

Professor Lyle initially assumed the opposition stemmed from “perceived biases in the criminal justice system.” And certainly there are biases. But Lyle found little evidence for that hypothesis.

I suspect the answer has something to do with the weight of history. Blacks are intimately familiar with this nation’s legacy of lynching, during which people were killed by mobs in the name of justice — and of how dehumanizing that process was to all concerned.

Many black neighborhoods also have been decimated by eye-­for-­an-­eye thinking as practiced by gangs. Put another way, black communities have had enough experience with murderous vengeance to know that it almost never leads to anything good. Also, the death penalty has been carelessly applied. As the ACLU has pointed out, between 1973 and 2014 some 150 people were exonerated from death row, hardly a testament to the efficacy of the process.

It’s hard to see how killing anyone — particularly those obviously demented — offers much in the way of relief to even the most beleaguered community. And any relief it offers has to be measured against the reality that the death penalty is somewhat symbolic. A death row inmate typically spends over a decade in prison before being put to death. And it’s expensive symbolism since death penalty cases are much more costly than life without parole prosecutions.

Wouldn’t it be great if all that energy, time, money and suffering could somehow be put into the service of improving lives instead of simply adding more dead bodies to the pile?

Ellis Cose, writer in residence for the ACLU and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is the author of The End of Anger and The Rage of a Privileged Class. Follow Cose on Twitter @EllisCose.