Posted on 07/17/2013 3:15:18 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
What happens when African Americans don’t get a jury of their peers?
While the unquestionably unfair verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, rendered in Florida by five whites and one Latina, should be deeply troubling to persons of all races who care about racial justice, U. S. history, as well as the current racial reality in this country, teaches that it should not come as a surprise.
The jury, simply put, decided that a white police wannabe could justifiably profile an unarmed African-American 17-year-old as a criminal, hunt him down, and fatally shoot him.
Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump likened the case to that of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy who was kidnapped and brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Others have posited the question: What would the result have been if the accused was African-American and the victim was white? The Scottsboro case—nine black boys wrongfully accused of raping a white woman in Alabama in the 1930s—comes to mind. In both cases all-white juries delivered clearly racist verdicts, acquitting Till’s murderers and convicting the Scottsboro Boys.
To be sure, those cases arose in the Deep South during the violently racist Jim Crow era more half a century ago. But the verdict in the Martin case once again exposes that the justice system in this country is still fundamentally racist. Black president or not, juries will continue to set white perpetrators free while wrongfully convicting African Americans so long as a “jury of your peers” means an exclusively or predominately white jury.
Here in Chicago, in 1969, Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were slain in a hail of gunfire. It was later conclusively shown that the predominantly white raiding police fired more than 90 bullets, while the Panthers fired just one. Yet no murder charges were ever brought, the raiders were acquitted by a Democratic-machine judge, and a civil jury, comprised of five whites and one black, hung, with the black juror, along with one white, holding out for the Panther victims.
In Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979, a caravan of Klansmen and Nazis drove into town and massacred five anti-Klan demonstrators, wounding at least 10 more. Much of the cold-blooded attack on this militant multi-racial group was captured on video tape, yet all-white juries twice acquitted the white supremacist perpetrators—first of murder, then, in a subsequent federal trial, of criminal civil rights violations. A six-person civil jury later brought back a compromise verdict against some of the defendants, driven by the only black juror over the resistance of the four southern white jurors.
In Chicago in 1982, Andrew Wilson, an African American who was charged with murdering two white Chicago police officers, was brutally tortured with electric shock and burning by Chicago police Lieutenant Jon Burge and several of his “asskickers.” Then Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley refused to prosecute Burge, so Wilson pursued a civil suit. Although Wilson stood convicted of the murders when his civil case went to trial in 1989, a racially mixed six-person jury hung, three to three along racial lines. On retrial, an all-white jury found Burge and his associates not liable for the torture they committed.
In Los Angeles in 1991, Rodney King, an African American motorist, was brutally beaten by several white cops, with the beating captured on videotape. Nonetheless, a state court jury that had no black representation acquitted the officers of state criminal charges. The acquittal so outraged the African-American community that riots ensued. Subsequently a racially mixed federal jury convicted two of the four charged officers of criminal civil rights violations.
More recently, aided by DNA evidence and the revelation of rampant police and prosecutorial misconduct, hundreds of African-American men who were wrongfully convicted by predominantly white juries have been freed. Just last month, in Chicago, Daniel Taylor was exonerated after two decades in prison. At 17, Taylor was convicted of murder on the basis of a coerced confession, despite the fact that the jury was presented with uncontroverted evidence that Taylor was in police lockup at the exact time of the murder. Only one African American sat on Taylor’s 12-person jury. In stark contrast, an all-white jury in Joliet, Illinois last month acquitted a white police officer whose wanton beating of Shantique Jackson, an African-American woman, was recorded on videotape.
The paramount reason that few or no blacks served on these juries is that, historically and today, underrepresentation of blacks is built into the selection system from start to finish. Until the 1960s and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, jury pools, which were drawn from voter lists, were virtually all white in the Jim Crow South. And in many of the infamous verdicts since then, the demographics of the jurisdiction made the pool of blacks small to begin with. In the Rodney King case, for instance, the venue in the state criminal case was moved from Los Angeles to the virtually all-white Simi Valley.
Additionally, trial judges control who is excused for cause, and often reflect both their own and the system's biases. Someone with a criminal background is vulnerable to being excused for cause by the judge, particularly in criminal cases, as is a person who has been a victim of a crime, has a family member in prison, or has a bias against police or law enforcement. These conditions disproportionately affect black Americans. Trial judges also control the questioning of prospective jurors, and they all too often avoid or limit probing questioning that could expose a juror's racial bias in order to protect jurors from embarrassment. (Of course, judges can also have a positive effect: In the Greensboro civil case, a liberal judge brought in from Virginia was bound and determined not to have a third all-white jury, so, after conducting extensive questioning and excusing more than 200 white jurors because of their declared racial biases, he forced the lawyers for the City and the KKK to let a black person sit; it was that juror who was responsible for there not being a third not guilty verdict.)
Then there are the pre-emptory challenges exercised by the lawyers. Although, since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Batson, prosecutors—and lawyers defending police, white supremacists, and the like—cannot overtly use race as a reason to challenge a juror, they still work very hard to exclude the few blacks who make it onto the venires in racially polarized cases because they know that the more white the jury is, the better chance they have to win. It is also important to note that the blacks who do sit, particularly if they are the only one, are under a tremendous amount of pressure to go along with the dominant white majority—a pressure that they have historically been subjected to since birth—and it takes a particularly strong individual, like the juror in Greensboro, to resist that pressure and maintain his or her beliefs.
The decision by the predominately white Zimmerman jury, like all those that have come before it, demonstrates once again that jurors are swayed by their racial biases. This is particularly true in cases where the evidence pits whites against blacks, where the standard is “reasonable doubt” as in all criminal cases, and where racial stereotypes are permitted to go unchallenged by operation of the legal fiction that race is not an legitimate issue in the case and therefore cannot be mentioned. Sadly, until the justice system and its juries reflect the actual diversity of this country, and the powerful issue of race is openly and fairly dealt with in racially charged cases, we can expect this racially driven double standard of “justice” to continue unabated with the predictable result of more jarringly unfair verdicts like the one that was so quickly and coldly rendered in the Trayvon Martin case.
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The Author
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People's Law Office (PLO), was one of the lead lawyers in the Hampton, Greensboro and Wilson civil cases, and has more than 40 years experience in selecting juries in racially and politically charged cases. The PLO is a Chicago civil rights law firm whose attorneys have been fighting for victims of police torture, brutality, wrongful convictions, false arrest and other government abuses for over 40 years. For more information, visit peopleslawoffice.com.
.....unarmed African-American 17-year-old as a criminal, hunt him down, and fatally shoot him.....
No wonder why Blacks are in uproar (the mindless ones).
inflammatory.
No mention any where that Tray was beating Zim...
Maybe he should have been.
Or this partisan liar, Flint Taylor. When people wittingly lie, they lose all credibility. This guy is spewing nothing more relevant than dog vomit.
Maybe somebody ought to use his head for a basketball - just for a few minutes, though, wouldn’t want him to suffer permanent brain damage. Then ask him how much he was concerned with the race of the dribbler, in the moment.
What a joke.
If you have to lie to win, you haven’t got much of an argument to start with.
It wouldn't do any good they will not listen to anything except what they want to hear.
trayvon was not a model citizen.
He was kicked out of school & his mothers house He was sent to live in Sanford with his father & his girlfriend. He was a bad kid. Yet they try to portray him as a choir boy.
Now why hasn't the homo crowd gotten outraged that trayvon went after George because he thought he was a homo?
I have come to the inevitable conclusion that there are many things in the world worse than racism...but try telling that to the racists.
It's the "Accused" that are entitled to a Jury or their "Peers".
What a DumbA$$.
An yes racial justice. I woke up this morning and said, “today is the day I care about racial justice!” Then I said “nah!” And went back to watching cartoons.
In the Georgia case of the teenaged baby-killer, what would that jury have to look like?
If racial unrest follows Zimmerman jury decision, blame it on Activist Obama
Saturday, July 13, 2013 12:08:14 PM · 18 of 26
mosesdapoet to rktman
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3042477/posts
This is reference to an editorial run in Canada Free Press. The Canadians got it right.! Too bad half of the so called conservatives talk show hosts I’ve been listening to can’t seem to be willing to connect the dots to what a heavy hand his imperious highness played in this example of socialist justice meted out to serve the policies of the state . Turning this into a show trial replete with wall to wall tv coverage.
.For certain since the not guilty verdict has been rendered the facts of this case are still being concealed by the media such as pictures of both side by side they look like cousins. The mixed area that Zimmerman was a “watch captain” in is a mini US melting pot which includes a number of black familys . They were struggling with single and groups of young blacks on the prowl., In some instances armed, preying on homeowners.in his area..That area wasn’t even examinined because it wouldn’t fit their agenda , if true journalisim existed,wouldn’t support any racial assertion..It might even explain Zimmerman’s action taken during his surveilance of Martin . In many watch areas that’s done frequently when the subject disappears from view they may leave their vehicle and continue surveilance on foot.. ....
Even after learning the shooter was a staunch Obama supporter, not Jewish, and a very dark skinned “hispanic” Obama did nothing to curtail the hyperbole or tone down his edict creating this as a racist episode.and of course ignored Zimmerman’s defence of a homeless black maltreated by a local police officer which resulted in the disciplining of the offending officer. The socialists controlling the media propaganda machine oblidged.. They began claiming the exclusive “gated” neighborhood watch captain was a “white hispanic” . used a picture of a 12 year old Martin instead of the 6 foot 165 pound person he was vs the smaller 140 pound lttle fatty neighborhood watch captain. Worse yet allowed his US Attorney General to use questionable activities to promote a show trial and ignored using a threat of prosecution to black militant groups threatening the watch captain’s life.
Meanwhile attacks by black groups on selected happless white victims which wind in their death get ignored by the mainline socialist messengers MSM service and black on black killings many of the age of the so called victim is likewise same-o same-o.
Do not confuse todays politicians and their ahearants in the press and academia as followers of “Liberalism”. . These are die hard God denying I’m right you’re wrong socialists incapable of independent thinking running todays media.. Devising political campaigns of lies and manipulated inflamatory languange disguised as “news or reliable information” designed to destroy any opponent or group to what is edict-ed by their leader. You must wind up goose-stepping in unison protecting the collective otherwise we will through the use of government step on you and squash you like some insect.. Until the quashers are quashed this will continue..
Horsefeathers. The jurors weren’t Zimmerman’s “peers” either if absolute homogeneity is considered, but they had measurable IQ’s and integrity.
Only a hopeless ignoramus or a shameless liar could write that sentence. Or maybe this character is just an incureable guilt-ridden, self-loathing white fool.
I refer to So. Africa and the absense of jury trails there. Fair and legal doesn’t mean the likes of the justice citizens who tried to kill Reginald Denny over Rotney King black motorist. The euphemistic description of the lawlessness was that they were just caught up in the mayhem. Yeah right let’s talk treats. Throw the dog a bone.
Sounds like typical white liberal communist radical agitator. Zimmerman was half Hispanic with black antecedents. Were it not for Florida’s gun laws and Zimmerman’s ability to use a firearm, Zimmerman’s brains would have been spattered all over the sidewalk merely for.checking out a suspicious character in his “hood”.
With growth of non black minorities in America and the increasing number of mixed race Americans, the lunatic ravings of idiots like this and the race huckstering of frauds and racialist pimps like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpetkn not to mention the Racial Pimp in Chief and his equality vicious racial pimp Holder are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
If blacks don't wanna be profiled/identified as "Gangsta", how about cleaning up their act????/
It’s people like the author that really make one want to say “Screw it” in regards to race relations. It gets old when you break your back trying to please some people and they keep whining about how bad they’ve got it no matter what you do.
Now why hasn’t the homo crowd gotten outraged that trayvon went after George because he thought he was a homo?
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Trayvon didn’t need that reason to beat up George , I think he had already made a decision to beat George when his girlfriend came up with the magic reply he would later supply to the police if necessary “he might be a rapist” , “I was afraid” ... The punk was casing the neighborhood and was caught , George ruined his chances of cleanly getting away with burglarizing a few houses while he was visiting Sanford.
Ping
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