Perhaps I didn't get across what I was trying to say. My point was that legally, it's going to be easier for the courts to convict a poor person with a public defender on murder/non-neglient manslaughter charges than a rich person with an expensive lawyer.

What would be interesting to see is the rate at which charged persons of certain socioeconomic tiers successfully defended their case, or were able to plead down to a lesser charge if they were originally charged with homicide.

There are almost twice as many white people living in poverty in the USA than black people. Why would we assume that white people who commit murder will be rich and can afford an expensive lawyer, while the black people who commit murder will be poor?

It's true that more black people live in poverty than white people per capita, but it's also true that crime is not evenly distributed across all people per capita, and has a connection with poverty level. My point is that there are more white people living in poverty, and they commit crimes at lower rates per capita and also total than black people.

I don't have data for all of these arguments handy, but here's one resource on poverty levels by race and region: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceeth...

Also note that controlling for poverty does not eliminate the effect where blacks commit more crime than whites:

http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/parker/SOCI836_S08_files/McN...

> > As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...] Although this finding appears to provide partial support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis

We could speculate that lots of things might be true, but if we're going to approach this topic scientifically, we should analyze data that we have, and not simply posit hypothetical after hypothetical. E.g. speculation like: "maybe all the unsolved murders are committed by whites"or "maybe white defendants are getting off when blacks aren't" -- a fine train of thought to explore and validate with data, but it's just speculation unless/until there are data and evidence to back it up.

Whoa whoa, it's not that police don't care who kills somebody. That's way off. Problem is in many cities, snitches don't just get stitches, they get killed along with whoever might be living with them. ASK homicide detectives or better yet watch one of the hundreds of episodes of 'The First 48' and you'll see that investigators get very little help in these tight knit urban communities.

And to carry forward your good point -- black people are committing more murders, but also being killed by murderers more often, as well as growing up in neighborhoods where murders happen and losing family members -- etc. Communities with more criminals have more victims as well. To pretend like it's not the case is to turn your back on the large number of victims, who deserve better regardless of the race of the perpetrator.

you've got it wrong. Investigators do so much work to help these families. No cop wants a murderer to walk, that's why they get into the job in the first place. If you haven't talked to police before, especially investigation units, you need to recognize your assumptions are wrong.