According to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, about 42% of death row inmates in the United States are black. What makes this statistic astonishing is that blacks make up only 13% of the population in this country. While most Americans are aware that blacks are overrepresented on death row, less is known about how these racial dynamics shape African Americans’ attitudes about the criminal justice system and their own sense of citizenship. We also know little about how race, religion, and other factors like age and gender intersect to produce distinct perspectives on attitudes about the death penalty. Melynda J. Price provides insight into these previously unexplored areas of social science in her new book, At the Cross. Using a mixed-methods and multidisciplinary approach, Price provides a unique and fascinating analysis that explores why the African American community is so skeptical of the death penalty.

Price moves beyond previous research in this area by providing a holistic view on the various institutions and key players that shape both racial disparities on death row and blacks’ attitudes about capital punishment. The book begins with an examination of the media’s portrayal of African Americans on death row and a comparative analysis of two death row inmates, Gary Graham, an African American man, and Karla Faye Tucker, a white woman. The similarities of these cases—both inmates are on death row in the same state under the same governor, both inmates are going through public religious transformations, and both cases are salient with the public—allow Price to better understand how the media and public view claims of posttrial innocence among those most stereotyped with criminality (black men) and those who are perceived as being the most innocent (white women).

In the second chapter, Price also explores how African Americans are systematically excluded from capital punishment juries. She argues that legal remedies used to block racial discrimination in jury selection are actually used to conceal discriminatory practices by prosecutors. In what I think is the most compelling chapter of this well-written book, the author analyzes capital cases in which Batson objections were made in the state of Texas. Her analysis reveals that prosecutors use a number of tactics to get around perceptions of discrimination, including the dismissal of black jurors based on individual knowledge of someone with a criminal record. Given that African Americans disproportionately have criminal records, and blacks are more likely to associate with coracial individuals, the denial of rights for blacks in the criminal justice system often extends to blacks without criminal records. This denial of the right to sit on juries not only limits blacks’ citizenship because of their associations with other African Americans but also plays a large role in continuing the racial disparities on death row.

The third, fourth, and fifth chapters examine how intersectionality in the black community shapes public opinion on the death penalty, with a focus on religion and collective identity. The third chapter utilizes the Houston Area Survey to analyze which factors predict support for capital punishment. As in most previous studies, Price finds that a majority of blacks do not support the death penalty. However, she builds upon previous research by demonstrating that blacks who are most cognizant of racial discrimination had the highest levels of opposition toward capital punishment.

While the author did not find that perceptions of religious importance shaped attitudes about an individual’s support for or opposition to the death penalty, religion was used as a justification among the blacks in her focus group for why they opposed the death penalty. Many of Price’s participants from a 2004 Houston metropolitan-area focus group opposed the death penalty on the basis of their understanding of the Bible and their perception of God as the only valid administrator of life-and-death decisions. Beyond religion, the discussions from the focus group also reveal how sociohistorical legacies of discrimination in the black community continue to shape blacks’ skepticism of fairness in the application of capital punishment.

Price’s focus-group discussions also demonstrated that while religion mattered in explaining opposition to the death penalty, blacks were not more supportive of death row inmates who went through a religious transformation. This was evident in the perception of black members of the focus group that Karla Faye Tucker’s religious conversion was mostly a political tactic. The result indicates that while religion matters to blacks, race and perceptions of inequality in the administration of capital punishment matter more. Price’s use of qualitative data provides for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which religion shapes attitudes about the death penalty that most survey analyses would miss.

While the book provides valuable insight into the study of race and capital punishment, it does leave several questions unanswered. In particular, Price argues strongly that the Houston metropolitan area should be used as a case study to examine the interaction of race and religion on attitudes about capital punishment. However, it would be nice to know how her results from the Houston area fit with blacks’ attitudes nationally. An analysis of a national survey in Chapter 3 would be a good complement to her analysis of blacks’ attitudes from the Houston area survey. Moreover, while the focus of the book was on African Americans, a comparative analysis of whites and Latinos would help identify whether and how the influence of race and religion on attitudes about capital punishment are unique to African Americans. For example, do liberal whites and Latinos also use religion to justify their opposition to the death penalty? Moreover, does knowledge of institutional violence toward blacks also lead nonblacks to be more skeptical of capital punishment? In fairness, the author does acknowledge some of these concerns, and these questions are beyond the scope of the study.

At the Cross is a fascinating and well-written book that should be read by anyone who is interested in studying racial and ethnic politics, legal studies, religious studies, and American politics in general. As a number of states consider abolishing the death penalty given the arguably inherit inequalities in the system, and as public opinion on the issue continues to evolve, At the Cross represents a significant and necessary contribution to our understanding of the formation of attitudes about capital punishment and how the criminal justice system limits equal rights for blacks in the United States.