On Thursday morning, MSNBC guest host Mara Schiavocampo devoted a segment of the show to discussing the story of Marissa Alexander, a Florida woman who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot into a wall at the home of her ex-husband. She brought on Joy-Ann Reid, TheGrio.com editor and blogger, to discuss the comparability of this case to the Trayvon Martin case as well as implications that the Alexander case sentencing could attest to “a racial disparity in how the lies are applied.” [Link to the audio here]

Schiavocampo then introduced a shoddy Tampa Bay Times report that she said supported these claims of “racial imbalance” including two sets of statistics from the report about the rate of convictions based on the race of the victim and defendant respectively. The first set reported that when there was a black victim, the accused faced no penalty 73% of the time while the same was true only 59% of the time when the victim was white. The second statistic showed that, in fatal cases, black defendants went free 66% of the time while white defendants went free in 61% of cases.