Posted on 04/07/2008 7:52:18 AM PDT by SmithL
Raise your hand if you are a racist.
The question put to potential jurors today in U.S. District Court likely won't be that blunt, but the aim is the same: Ferret out anyone who cannot be color-blind when deciding the fate of accessory to fatal carjacking suspect Eric "E" Boyd.
It is an unusual inquiry in what U.S. District Judge Tom Varlan is already foreseeing as an uncommon method to seat an impartial jury in an inflammatory case involving a headline-grabbing crime and a resulting racial firestorm.
Boyd is standing trial beginning today on charges he helped hide Lemaricus "Slim" Davidson, the alleged ringleader in the January 2007 torture slaying of 21-year-old University of Tennessee student Channon Christian and her 23-year-old boyfriend, Christopher Newsom.
The couple was out on a date when armed suspects confronted them and demanded Christian's Toyota 4 Runner. But the carjacking quickly turned into a kidnapping, with the pair taken to a house on Chipman Street, beaten, tortured and raped. Newsom was slain first. He was shot, and his body set afire. Christian's ordeal would continue for several more hours before she was strangled and her body stashed inside a garbage can in the house.
Boyd is not charged in those slayings. However, Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Jennings and Tracy Stone must prove Davidson was involved in the fatal carjacking in order to convince jurors Boyd was an accessory. That means Boyd's trial will inevitably serve as a preview of the capital murder case filed in Knox County Criminal Court against Davidson and three alleged cohorts. And that case already has drawn protests organized by hate groups protesting what they contend is a dearth of national coverage of a black-on-white crime and spurred sometimes heated dialogue on whether it should be labeled a hate crime.
The suspects are black; the victims white.
All of that adds up to a more rigorous than usual process of picking a jury. Varlan already has mapped out a method he outlined at a hearing Friday.
"It's a little different," the judge said with a grin.
Some 80 potential jurors are being summoned today, a larger pool than is customary. Varlan plans to use two courtrooms to carry out the uncustomary "prequalification" process he said he intends to employ to try to weed out potential jurors already prejudiced by either media coverage of the case or racial bias.
After addressing the entire pool in one courtroom, Varlan will move next door to his own courtroom. So jurors won't know Boyd is already behind bars pending trial, Jennings, Stone and defense attorney Phil Lomonaco will enter that courtroom via the same entrance used to bring in prisoners.
Varlan said he will bring in 14 jurors at a time to begin polling them on possible biases or conflicts.
"If we get a yes answer or a show of hands, then I will follow up with individual questioning," Varlan said. "After we go through that process … we would then come up with a number that would be prequalified. We would then start our normal (jury selection) process."
Lomonaco said he was skeptical that potential jurors would honestly disclose racial bias.
"People don't want to admit they have bias," he said. "Some don't even know they have it."
Varlan disagreed, turning aside Lomonaco's request to quiz potential jurors himself about prejudices they might harbor.
"There should be no need if the pre-qualification process goes as I anticipate," Varlan said.
at what point does it become an epidemic? Should the discrimination laws be amended to protect white women??
Ping!
I’d wait until after the Democratic national convention before I decided to move into any large city. If Obama doesn’t get the nomination I suspect there will be problems in many cities.
Interesting that you refer to the Wichita incident as an atrocity. I had been using that term to refer to this Knoxville case but then I read the earlier stories about dismemberment were not true, or were made up by some hate mongers. But now the news articles refer to ‘torture,’ and say the young man’s body was set on fire. If this is not atrocious and sadistic, I don’t know what is.
Of course you are right in your # 18 post about PC and why few are willing to talk bluntly about this case. My criticism was aimed at the media for saying only hate groups were complaining. We here on FR are complaining and enraged but not because of any extremism.
I do not consider myself better than a black man because I am white. I consider myself better than many black men because I am gainfully employed, educated, and I obey the law and respect the civil rights of others. I do not blame others for my problems or look to others to solve them. I also consider myself better than many white men for the same reasons. The redneck trailer park culture is just as flawed and inferior as the black culture, and for the same reasons.
The only attention media gives this story is when they try to make it NOT about race which it was most certainly was
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