The United States court system is far from being flawless. Innocent people are convicted today due to society’s prejudices based on race. Racial bias has influenced verdicts all over the country in small and large communities alike. Race has a large impact on the degree of the verdict decided by the jury. Extreme cases still exist today, even though none can probably compare to that of Emmett Till, there are juries that narrowly judge based on race. One of many race influenced cases today is the Jenna Six, in which Mychal Bell was convicted to 22 years in prison sentence by an all white jury and white judge. There are several behavioral inputs that influence the court’s ruling with respects to race. The race of both the victim and the defendant can affect the jury’s judgment. The racial composition of the jury can also affect how other juries reflect on case. As in the O.J. Simpson case, in which the jury was composed of mostly African-Americans, many people had differing opinions with the verdict and felt that race relations had caused O.J. to be acquitted (as seen in a 1995 CNN/USA today poll). When analyzing the issue of race in the court we have to take into consideration how this could potentially put innocent people to death by racial prejudices. Considering the study conducted by Jennifer Eberhardt, we can see that there is some relationship with the degree of punishment and racial stereotypes. People aren’t judging the defendants as “individuals” as Eberhardt says; they are judging them based on “a conflict between races”. Societal flaws are revealed in our system, and affect the way justice is administered; but making sure that a representative jury can reach an informed based decision without regard to race would help ensure the system is fair.
2 comments:
I agree that race is a huge factor in deciding guilt and punishment. How do you propose to get around this roadblock? Do you think the constituents of the jury should be divided up based upon race? I think that if we could mandate that a proportion of the jurors represent different races in America we might have more proportionate sentences, but that doesn't seem like it would be feasible for all court cases. And even if that did happen, what about the less prevalent races, such as Native Americans, which could not be fit into the juries since they make up such a small proportion of the population?
I am so intrigued by this topic! In today's society, people look back on history and think everything has changed, but the truth is we still have many of the same major problems. Sometimes it's even scary to think that racism still occurs, especially in our court system. I noticed arty proposed some way of equally dividing up the jury to somehow prevent these biases, which I completely agree with. I'm not sure how practical it would end up being, but right now it seems that juries can be completely one-sided, even when they're suppossed to be random and impartial. I would love to look into that change.
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