Trials and Conclusion

Finally, the trial process furthers racial disparities and discrimination of minority groups. Trials focus on eyewitnesses, which are not always true accounts of what transpired in a crime (Arthur). Trails are also dependent on testimonies of others that many not always be accurate either. Once the trial starts African Americans and other minorities have already been through the pre-trial steps and are disproportionately more likely to be convicted of the criminal charges.

Race plays a role in all of the factors in the criminal justice system. These blog posts were just a brief overview of how race is intertwined in the system and how this can lead to more African American and other minority people being sentenced to prison for longer terms, ,and not being able to get out. The whole system keeps racially minorities in a place that they have a hard time getting out of. Once someone is arrested then convicted of a crime it is hard for them to reenter society once they are out of prison and creates a cycle of potentially entering the system again. More needs to be done to figure out how to reduce racial disparities and discrimination in the criminal justice system.


References:

Arthur, Mikaila. “Courts, Juries & Trials.” Minority Issues in Justice. PowerPoint.

Black, Timothy. 2009. When A Heart Turns Rock Solid. New York: Vintage Books.

Cole, David. 1999. “Judgement and Discrimination.” Pp. 117-138 in Blind Goodness: A Reader On Race And Justice, edited by Alexander Papachristou. New York, NY: The New Press.

Goffman, Alice. 2014. On The Run. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Heffernan, Shannon. 2014. “Jury Nullification.” The Life of The Law, 1-4.

Merriam-Webster: 2014. “Bail.” Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Retreived December 2014 (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bail)

Merriam-Webster: 2014. “Jury.” Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Retreived December 2014 (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/juries)

Merriam-Webster: 2014. “Public Defender.” Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Retreived December 2014 (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/public%20defender)

Papachristou, Alexander, ed. 2011. Blind Goodness: A Reader On Race And Justice. New York, NY: The New Press.

Jury Nullification: Could It Reduce Racial Disparities?

Jury nullification is an aspect of the criminal justice system that most students, citizens and most importantly jurors lack knowledge of. Shannon Heffernan explains jury nullification in her article titled, Jury Nullification. Jury nullification happens when a jury “finds a defendant not guilty, although the jurors may actually believe he is guilty” (Heffernan 2014: 2). Many believe that jury nullification happens because “jurors don’t agree with a law, or think there should be an exception” (Heffernan 2014: 2). When jury nullification occurs, the defendant cannot be tried again for the same crime, thanks to the double-jeopardy rule, and is then let go.

Jury nullification is not a concept that the criminal justice system wants citizens, especially jurors, to know about. Heffernan discusses how it is discouraged in three different ways:

[First, jurors] take an oath that says [they] will uphold the law. Second, defense lawyers aren't allowed to tell a jury to nullify. Third, most judges give instructions to a jury that basically tell them that they must find a defendant guilty if they broke the law (Heffernan 2014: 4)

This protocol discourages jurors from finding a not guilty verdict when the defendant is actually guilty. Some people have tried to bring awareness to jury nullification, but people involved in the legal system do not like this and tries to keep these people who preach about nullification quiet (Heffernan 2014).

To open the door to the concept of jury nullification defense lawyers could speak about what jury nullification is and educate the community about it before citizen become jurors. If American citizens know what jury nullification is then they might use it more if they believe that a person is being wrongfully persecuted or if they believe laws are too harsh for different crimes. Jury nullification is a tricky concept, because it can also get jurors in trouble for things like perjury, and other laws. People can be rejected for knowing about jury nullification, and if they do not let the lawyer know that they know about the concept when a lawyer inquires about it, they are committing perjury, which is a crime (this is discussed in the video below).

In Heffernan’s article she explains how lawyer Paul Butler describes the first time he experienced jury nullification as a prosecutor.Butler states that the jury nullified because they did not want to see another young Black man because he was so young and had a life ahead of him (Heffernan 2014). He could not believe that jurors decided to not convict the young Black man of the drug offense that he was being charged with, when the man definitely did commit the crime. Butler later reflects on how jury nullification can be useful to reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqH_Y1TupoQ

Juries

Another part of our criminal justice system is juries. A jury is “a group of people who are member of the public and are chosen to make a decision in a legal case” (Merriam-Webster). Juries are an important part of the court and trial process, but also contribute to racial disparities and discrimination.

Juries are supposed to be made up of the criminally charged peers, but this is not always the case. Throughout history, juries were made up of people who were similar to the defendant in the case, but today this is not what happens. This gives a good amount of power to ordinary citizens who usually do not have that much education, or experience with the system. Without knowledge of how of criminal justice system works and whom it targets juries send many people to prison for crimes that are not as serious as others. Many juries do not know that they are contributing to a larger problem of incarcerating young African American men at higher rates than any other group of people in the United States.

Juries are made up of different amounts of people in both state and federal cases. In a federal criminal trial there are 12 jurors, while in a state criminal trial there can be anywhere from 6 to 12 jurors (Arthur). Most of the time juries do not have to be unanimous either.  

Juries are created through different means. They can be created from list systems or key man systems. List systems are generated from “a list of potential jurors from driver’s licenses, voter registration” and through other public records (Arthur: 33). Key man systems are when jurors are selected based on a “voting registrar [who] selects people to be on the list based on reputation and influence” (Arthur: 33). In both types of lists Blacks and other minorities are underrepresented.

This underrepresentation can occur for many reasons. Blacks and other minorities are less likely to be on voting registrations (this may be related to felony disenfranchisement, which does not allow people who have been convicted of felonies to vote during their incarceration, while they are on parole, or even for life), have identification, or a driver’s license. Alice Goffman, the author of On the Run, explains in her ethnography how Black people have a hard time acquiring identification. Goffman explains how the young Black men go through other means to obtain identification then doing it legally (Goffman 2014). This contributes to why Blacks and other minorities do not serve on juries. Other reasons for under representation include: that minorities are less likely to return juror questionnaires, that intelligence test can be used to select jurors, felony disqualification, and that minorities may have trouble with language (Arthur).

Jurors are also put through tests and more before they narrow down the twelve people that will sit of the jury. David Cole states in his essay, Judgement and Discrimination,  that discrimination takes place in jury selection. He says that all white juries are a “staple of the American criminal justice system” (Cole 1999: 119). Cole describes in this essay how race discrimination is still a prevalent part of jury selection today (Cole 1999: 119). This contributes to jurors lacking the knowledge of what is really taking place in the American criminal justice system. All white juries are not going to not convict a young African American if they believe he is guilty of the alleged crime he committed.

Other contributions to why African Americans and other minority groups do not serve on juries relates to people can be not selected to be on juries for no reasons at all. Although it is not constitutional to discriminate when selecting jurors it is still practiced.  

Example: Public Defending

Examples of how public defenders are not the best source of counsel are found everywhere in the United States. Timothy Black, author of When A Heart Turns Rock Solid, highlights how a public defender can have little interest in his client. Black describes how one of the brothers, Sammy Rivera, in which his ethnography is centered around, had little faith in the public defender assigned to him. Sammy is a young, Puerto Rican man who lives in many places in New England, and has gotten involved in the drug trade. Both Sammy and Tim (who is a White professor) try to contact the public defender to talk to him about Sammy’s case, but they both fail to get a hold of him. Later when Sammy meets his public defender on the day of his trial, the lawyer says he never received any calls from Sammy, but did receive one from Tim. The public defender then tries to get Sammy to agree to a plea bargain. Sammy does not want to do this, and the public defender finally is able to negotiate the sentence awaiting Sammy to three years (Black 2009).

What this example highlights is how minorities, like Sammy, only have a public defender to help them navigate the legal system. Latinos and African Americans are more likely to accept plea bargains and other offers because they do not know they can proceed with a trial. Sammy was fortunate that he had Tim. Tim helped him navigate the system alongside the public defender.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Heart-Turns-Rock-Solid/dp/0307454878

Courts: Bail

Another aspect of the public defenders job is to help with the negotiating of bail. Bail is also another way that the United States criminal justice system shows racial disparities and possibly discrimination. Bail is “the temporary release of a prisoner in exchange for the security given for the due appearance of the prisoner” (Merriam-Webster). Many Blacks and other racial minorities are not able to make bail because they can lack economic resources needed to pay for their release. This leaves minorities to remain in detention before their trail and can skew how the jury, prosecution and the judge look at the defendant in the criminal trial, increasing the rate of conviction for minority people.

The Pretrial Justice Institute explains how American Americans are have the highest bail amounts in the United States. Click here to proceed to their website, the video at the beginning explained the disparity.

Public defenders and other lawyers are  more like negotiators than anything else. Especially when it comes to bail and other pretrial negotiations. Today, "more than 90% of criminal cases" end with people being charged accepting plea bargains, than going to trial (Papachristou 2011: 85). This leads to the question of whether lawyers are actually trying to help their clients, or is they are just "on the front lines of processing people through the system"? (Papachristou 2011: 85). There are public defenders who are truly trying to help the people that are assigned to them through the system, but they cannot do this because they have a large caseload that they cannot treat every case the same.

Courts: Public Defenders

When a citizens has been arrested for committing a crime, they are read their rights by the police. One of these rights is the to counsel if you cannot afford it. This right applies to both the State court, and the Federal court systems. The right to counsel is supposed to be an effective way for people to navigate the criminal justice system and have someone to guide them through what they should during this process. The court system offers the right to counsel if you cannot afford it, but it does not offer the best counsel that a person could get. What is offered is a public defender. A public defender is "a lawyer who is paid by the government to defend people who are accused of crime and are unable to pay for a private lawyer" (Merriam-Webster).

There are different types of public counsel that are there to represent people who cannot afford their own lawyers. These types of public counsel are the public defender, a contract defender, and assigned counsel. All of these lawyers are overworked and underpaid. In New York public defenders can have up to 100 cases at a time, and many different cases in one day. Instead of being able to give equal attention to every case, public defenders have to pick and choose what cases to spend more time on. In a YouTube video about New York public defenders (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3mhqrXVv_w), a public defender admits to spending more time preparing for cases that are going to trial, than the other cases that he has to work on.

The public defenders are most often paid by the State and have to put in more time than they are actually paid for.Different States also put caps on how much public defenders, contract defenders, and assigned counsel and get paid for different types of criminal cases. 2007 data shows that public defenders are paid $92 an hour at the Federal level and that they can be paid upwards of $70 per hour at the State level, even though most State public defenders are not making that much money and can make only about $39 an hour in some States (Arthur). While public defenders are necessary in the United States criminal justice system, people represented by them are disproportionately Black or from other minority groups. People also represented by public defenders are more likely to be convicted of the crime that they are charged with, get longer sentences. This means that Blacks and other minorities are more prone to getting convicted and longer sentencing. Public defenders are also only appointed to people charged with crimes in during their first initial trial and then the first appeal. Once both are over convicted people do not have to right to counsel for other trials or reviews that they may encounter in their time being  incarcerated. This leaves people, predominantly minority people, in prison for longer periods of time because they do not have the proper legal guidance to help them with other appeals that they may file with the court.

Introduction: Courts, Trials and Juries

There are racial disparities and discrimination that occur throughout the United States criminal justice system. These disparities and discrimination have been occurring since the start of slavery and still continue, even today. The Country has thinks that we have moved forward and that every person here is treated equally by the law, and the criminal justice system. But looking at statistics minority people represent minor percents of our population, but greater percents in our criminal justice system and prison populations. This Blog is here to help students, citizens, and anyone else understand how the courts, juries, and trials operate in this Country. The main focus of the blog to to highlight the racial disparities and discrimination that occur throughout the court and trial process. Blacks and other minorities are more likely to be convicted of crimes and get longer sentences than Whites who do the same type of crimes. The likelihood of Blacks and other minorities going to prison and having longer sentences in dependent of the courts, juries and trials that are in place to figure out if a people has committed the crime they are accused of or not. In the next few Blog posts, I'll discuss the different aspects of the courts, juries and trials that may be discriminatory to minorities. 

Chart found at: http://www.project.org/info.php?recordID=174