Critical Self Analysis

These last few blog posting have been hectic for me personally. At first I felt as I didn't have enough sources on how race influences both jury decisions and how jury selection methods should equally represent minorities for the sake of eliminating racism in the jury. I decided upon the topic because I do feel that sometimes minorities are not represented fairly in small communities and are given much harsher punishments than they deserve. I felt this was due to racism, purely basing my decision on the Jenna 6 case and both the O.J. Simpson trial as well as the Rodney King trial. I hardly knew that this has been going on for quite sometime and there were evidence from experiments that indicated race did play a role in most cases. Now, that I look back on the issue I feel that racism can act not solely against a minority defendant but for him as well. I think the main reason some lawyers do challenge or question whether a minority juror should be in the jury box is because they stereotype the behaviors that come with minorities. Sadly enough sometimes they do exclude them because it will be against their favor in the case (which may or may not be racism). But I realized how difficult it is for minorities to be jurors not only for the qualities they look for in jurors but also the randomness of a cross-section. When we compare the O.J. Simpson and Rodney King trials we see that each case had a different racial mix up of the juries. O.J. was acquitted of murder with a jury mostly composed of minorities and Rodney King’s attackers were let free in front of an mostly white jury. I believe that people tend to judge people with respect to themselves, and sometimes they feel sympathy for the defendant because of it. Now I realize that some of the jury racial bias comes from an individual level since some progress has been made in eliminating racial discrimination when jury selection (The Batson v. Kentucky). In some of these cases it wasn’t so, there was clear racism but I ask my self how is our system ever going to be administering justice –an objective idea, with a system that has such subjective interpretation? I do believe that some of this individual behavior is never going to change and is going to keep our system flawed, but sometimes juries go out of hand when punishment is on the line. Racism may always taint people and their individual decisions but if someone is going to be convicted to the death penalty purely based on stereotypes, they are being denied their 8^th amendment rights and endure cruel and unusual punishment. So I may want to say that the federal government should set up some conditions that a person has to meet to become a juror. This should be set in motion to make sure explicitly that people do not exclude minorities from the jury to ensure minorities’ 14^th amendment rights (equal protection clause) and in effect instate a minority defendant with their 6^th amendment right to an impartial jury.