Posted on 04/26/2012 12:00:02 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Accused murderer of Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman almost certainly will eventually face a jury. And what if that jury is all white? A recent Duke University study showed that all white juries in Florida were more likely to convict a black defendant than mixed ethnic juries. Though Zimmerman isn’t black, the defense almost certainly will pull out all stops to make the case that Zimmerman was the real victim and that Martin was the aggressor. In essence this means that jurors will be asked to do a defendant and victim role reversal and put Martin on trial.
The massive barrage of digs, innuendoes, and slanders of Martin’s character and actions that fateful night has been relentless since the killing. So the rule that black defendants inevitably get the short end of the jury stick will be very much in play in the case against Zimmerman. That’s where the danger of an all white jury comes in in the Martin slaying. It could easily happen. Two years ago a Bureau of Justice Statistics report found racial discrimination in jury selection is still rampant, even blatant. A Supreme Court ruling and other court rulings that ban all white or non-black juries have been in far too many cases no more than paper decisions that have had little effect in insuring a diverse jury in cases involving black defendants. The same holds true where blacks have been the victims, and whites or non-blacks the defendants, as is the case with Zimmerman.
The report found that prosecutors and judges in eight Southern states used a litany of dodges, tactics, and legal ploys to outright exclude blacks from juries, or whittle the number of blacks on juries down. In capital cases, some jurisdictions don’t even go through the legal pretense of trying to get a racially balanced jury. In North Carolina at least 26 current death row defendants were sentenced by all-white juries. A new North Carolina state law, the Racial Justice Act, and a recent courageous ruling by an African-American judge to overturn the death sentence of a convicted black murderer under the act drew national attention to the blatant bias in all white jury decided cases.
The report also found that a racially diverse jury weighed evidence and testimony longer and more carefully, brought different perspectives and life experiences to the deliberations, and made fewer factual errors. These are crucial factors in the rare cases where cops are charged with killing young black or Hispanics. A jury with no blacks, composed of mostly older middle class whites, and non-black ethnics, is much more likely to believe the testimony of police and prosecution witnesses than black witnesses, defendants, or even the victims.
Prosecutors have a big task in trying to overcome pro-police attitudes and the negative racial stereotypes. Two Penn State University studies on racial perceptions and stereotypes, one in 2003 and a follow-up study in 2008, found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crimes, and in some cases where crimes were not committed by blacks they misidentified the perpetrator as an African-American. In three major racially charged cases in past years where blacks were the victims either beaten or killed by white cops Rodney King, Oscar Grant and Sean Bell, defense attorneys depicted all three men as the aggressors who posed a threat to the officers. They played up and exaggerated their run-ins with the law to depict young blacks as crime prone, menacing figures. The idea was to subtly and openly play on the prejudices, stereotypes, and negative beliefs of many white jurors toward young blacks.
Even when the victim has no criminal record and poses no threat to officers, the negative racial typecast still kicks in. This was the case when white jurors acquitted the four New York City cops tried for gunning down African immigrant, Amadou Diallo in 1999. They claimed that they feared for their lives.
Legal experts blame the paucity of blacks on many juries not on deliberate racial discrimination, but to the paltry number of blacks in the jury pool, changing demographics (the city is majority Hispanic, Asian and white), and the failure of blacks to heed jury summons.
This begs the issue. It doesn't much matter how few or how many blacks are in the jury pool, if prosecutors (or defense attorneys when the accused is white and victim black) use a storehouse of challenges, questionnaires, and profiles, to systematically strike blacks from a jury. And sometimes, they don’t even bother with the ploys.
The Dallas Morning News revealed in 2006 that Dallas prosecutors systematically dumped blacks from juries for years. The Supreme Court tossed the conviction of Texas death row inmate Thomas Miller-El based on a Dallas prosecutor's brazen racial jury sanitizing. Yet prosecutors still try to get as many whites, and as few blacks as possible, on juries.
The Zimmerman case jury may be fair and impartial. But to pretend that racial bias doesn't exist in racially charged trials is self-serving and dangerous. His case could again cast an ugly glare on jury race bias.
A jury of his peers !
Of course, doctors don’t get fair trials in med mal cases with the right of a jury of their peers.
Hispanic shoots black and gets tried by whites?
Sounds neutral to me. Seriously though, I resent the hell out of the notion that whites are de facto racists.
The idiot writing this article seems to have an underlying concern that Zimmerman might “escape” being made a sacrifice to “racial justice”. To that end the author is obviously willing to toss out legal procedures such as preemptory challenges all for the sake of “diversity”... when it suits his purpose.
Unless Zimmerman is railroaded into a conviction for second degree murder by a stacked jury, Obama’s unleashed racists are going to do violence against their race enemy - whites, and the country they hate - America.
I was in Washington DC during the riots.
Like you said the rioters burned their own neighborhood down.
Washingtons small Chinatown was only 3 blocks from the burning buildings on 7th. street N.W., not a window was broken in Chinatown.
Of course, the beauty of these pure numbers will be sullied by politics.
And what if it was all black?
Was that the 1967 riots in Detroit?
During the black riots I was working for Burroughs Corporation, then headquartered in Detroit and while there witnessed one of our secretaries killed by a stray bullet.
My wife and two kids were back in PIttsburgh and when I returned home my wife laid down an edict.
We were moving out of the city. Period.
We bought a home in a neighboring county and never looked back.
The next black riot will see ten of thousands of white people with guns, resisting the rioters.
One of my most vivid childhood memories is tied to the Baltimore riots. We lived waaaay out beyond the burbs, but a little brawl fired up in our town anyway. A couple stores had fires set and a street was briefly blocked. I didn't see all that because I was just a little kid. What I did see was my grandfather methodically loading M1 carbine mags on the dining room table. A shotgun was staged at each entrance and I was carefully forbidden to even go near them. I was futher forbidden to play outside or on the sun porch. My mom was beside herself because dad was in the National Guard and we thought he had been called up for armed patrol in Baltimore. It was a very scary day. As it turned out, nothing happened. The local nonsense petered out on its own and dad wasn't called up because he was on nuclear duty at the time (Maryland ANG controlled the Baltimore Nike missile bases).
Twenty-five years later I was surveying in Baltimore and the crew drove through a burned-out block. I was shocked when the party chief told me that those buildings has burned in the riots when I was a kid. They were still standing in the ninieties, untouched and uninhabited. It was eerie.
The PURPOSE of a jury of Zimmerman's peers IS TO BE FAIR TO ZIMMERMAN.
Trayvon has an advocate in the room, he's called the PROSECUTOR.
The SYSTEM is "unfair to Trayvon", because the BURDEN OF PROOF is on the State, NOT on Zimmerman.
Florida juries contain only 6 members, from what I’m reading about this case.
Mr. Zimmerman is black, it turns out.
Florida juries consist of 6 members, not 12, as I understand it.
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