The Tennessee Slave Code: A Legal Antecedent to Inequities in Modern Capital Cases

Numerous studies have found evidence of racial discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty, particularly in the South. In this article, the authors posit that the legal antecedents of modern discrimination in capital cases are found in the codified rules that governed slavery. Using the capital punishment provisions of the 1858 Slave Code of Tennessee, the biases inherent in the laws of the Old South are documented. The discriminatory practices that blacks faced both as victims and offenders under the slave codes are linked through historical analysis and conflict theory to the current discriminatory practices documented by modern death penalty research.