Former Confederate states more likely to impose death penalty.

A table in an articke at the BBC got me thinking.

The fifteen states who have executed most people since 1976 (in order of number of executions, not adjusted for population size) is as follows:

Texas
Virginia
Oklahoma*
Florida
Missouri
Georgia
Alabama
Ohio**
North Carolina
South Carolina
Arizona*                           
Arkansas
Louisiana
Mississippi
Indiana**

* Oklahoma and Arizona didn't become states until long after 1865. They were then federal territories (proto-states) which allowed slave ownership, so the chances are they would have joined the Confederation, but we'll never know for sure, so that gets it down to thirteen states.

The thirteen Confederate states were

Texas
Virginia
Florida
Georgia
Alabama
North Carolina
South Carolina
Arkansas
Louisiana
Tennessee**
Mississippi
and possibly, depending on whom you believe,
Kentucky**
Missouri

** You are left with exactly the same list of eleven states if you remove Ohio and Indiana from the first list, and Kentucky and Tennessee from the second. Interestingly, those four states are a contiguous bloc (arranged north to south), so they appear to have swapped places.

Ho hum, coincidence, causation or correlation..?

We know that the US justice system is incredibly racist and can assume that the former Confederate states are the most racist states. So I think it is correlation, i.e. having been a Confederate state and executing a large number of people have the same common cause.