Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year old African American boy who was murdered in Money, Mississippi after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Since he was from the north, he did not know that he was not allowed to talk to a white woman in the south. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great uncle’s house. They took the boy away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. Roy and Milam were acquitted of murder because of the all-white, all-male Mississippi jury. At the same time, Sheriff Strider booked Levi "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Lee Loggins into the Charleston, Mississippi jail to keep them from testifying. Both were black employees of Leslie Milam, J. W.'s brother, in whose shed Till was beaten. Therefore, racial bias effects jurors’ ability to give an impartial trial. As early as 1879, the United States Supreme Court, in Strauder v. West Virginia, loudly denounced the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from jury pools, finding that the practice violated the constitution, but state officials resisted its finding. The US Supreme Court has had to reapply the same basic principles to stop many state schemes designed to preclude Blacks from participating on grand juries, petit juries or both. In ... ... middle of paper ... ...s the difficulty proving it to the court that race was a factor in excluding the juror. Psychologically, we cannot expect jurors to be unbiased because we are human beings, so we cannot prevent them from thinking and judging the person in trial. We, human beings judge people by the way they look, talk, and what they wear. In addition, when we have majority white jurors in the jury panel, then we succumb to peer pressures and play “follow the leader.” The environment of racial “norm” is created, resulting in racial bias by the jurors. This “normative” racial attitude cloud jurors’ judgments, so they will make race driven decision. White jurors’ bias is more dangerous than the bias demonstrated by the jurors of a minority group because White jurors are superior in number. Therefore, racial bias does effect and cloud jurors’ ability to give an impartial and just trial.
In the early 1900’s racism was a force to be reckoned with, but not knowing the dangers of the south, Emmett Till was unaware of his actions and the consequences. While visiting his uncle in Mississippi Emmett Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman. Not knowing the dangers of the south Emmett acted like his casual, cocky self. Emmett Till’s death is thought to be the spark of the Civil Rights Movement (Crowe). Even though everyone knew who had murdered Emmitt, the men were never put to justice or charged.
The details disclosed that the prosecution highlighted the names of the potential black judges and tinted every black potential juror’s name in a different color. There were four different duplicates of the record of all of the individuals summoned for the task in the case. Evert record had a key, which indicated that the highlighted names represented the blacks. Besides, there were no any blotches made for the white jurors on the lists. There were also many marks made on the black people’s names on the juror questionnaires, and there was no any other race that was
On August 28, 1955, fourteen year old Emmett Till was beaten, tortured and shot. Then with barbed wire wrapped around his neck and tied to a large fan, his body was discarded into the Tallahatchi River. What was young Emmett’s offense that brought on this heinous reaction of two grown white men? When he went into a store to buy some bubblegum he allegedly whistled at a white female store clerk, who happened to be the store owner’s wife. That is the story of the end of Emmett Till’s life. Lynchings, beatings and cross-burning had been happening in the United States for years. But it was not until this young boy suffered an appalling murder in Mississippi that the eyes of a nation were irrevocably opened to the ongoing horrors of racism in the South. It sparked the beginning of a flourish of both national and international media coverage of the Civil Rights violations in America.
“[Emmett Till's murder was] one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century,” according to Martin Luther King Jr. On August 28, 1955 in Money, Mississippi, a 14 year old boy named Emmett Till from Chicago was beaten and mercilessly murdered by two white men for flirting with a white woman. The death of this unknowing child shocked the nation and was undeniably an important catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Emmett Till had been visiting family in the late summer of 1955. He hadn't known the rules in Southern United States. That was his first mistake. Emmett Till, an innocent 14 year old colored boy, found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River in 1955. 2 white men had been accused of the murder. His mother, Mamie Till, was not about to let someone get away with the murder of her 14 year old son. She wanted the people to see what had been done and Mamie Till wanted justice to be served. Mamie Till was fed up with the inequality and wanted to change it. She had her eyes on the prize.
Emmett Till Emmett Till was a 14 year old boy visiting Money,Mississippi from Chicago, Illinois in 1955. He whistled, flirted, and touched a white woman who was working at a store where Emmett Till was purchasing bubble gum. A day later Till was abducted at gunpoint from his great uncle’s house. 3 days after that Till’s body was found, unrecognizable other than a ring he had on. He was unprepared for the intense segregation of Mississippi.
Despite the efforts of lawyers and judges to eliminate racial discrimination in the courts, does racial bias play a part in today’s jury selection? Positive steps have been taken in past court cases to ensure fair and unbiased juries. Unfortunately, a popular strategy among lawyers is to incorporate racial bias without directing attention to their actions. They are taught to look for the unseen and to notice the unnoticed. The Supreme Court in its precedent setting decision on the case of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), is the first step to limiting racial discrimination in the court room. The process of selecting jurors begins with prospective jurors being brought into the courtroom, then separating them into smaller groups to be seated in the jury box. The judge and or attorneys ask questions with intent to determine if any juror is biased or cannot deal with the issues fairly. The question process is referred to as voir dire, a French word meaning, “to see to speak”. During voir dire, attorneys have the right to excuse a juror in peremptory challenges. Peremptory challenges are based on the potential juror admitting bias, acquaintanceship with one of the parties, personal knowledge of the facts, or the attorney believing he/she might not be impartial. In the case of Batson v. Kentucky, James Batson, a black man, was indicted for second-degree burglary and receipt of stolen goods. During the selection of the jury the prosecutor used his peremptory challenges to strike out all of the four black potential jurors, leaving an all white jury. Batson’s attorney moved to discharge the venire, the list from which jurors may be selected, on the grounds that the prosecutor’s peremptory challenges violated his client’s Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to have a jury derived from a “cross-section of the community”(People v. Wheeler, 583 P.3d 748 [Calif. 1978]). The circuit court ruled in favor of the prosecutor and convicted Batson on both counts. This case went through the courts and finalized in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Next, Institutional or systemic racism refers to the laws, policies, practices, rules and procedures that operate within organisations, societal structures and the broader community to the advantage of the dominant group or groups and to the detriment and disadvantage of other groups. Institutional racism may be intentional or unintentional. Jim Crowe is a great example of institutional racism. Jim Crow laws were the name of the racist caste system put in place to segregate African Americans, Hispanics and any ethnic minority. Theses laws made it so non whites could not integrate with minorities. These laws applied to hospitals, buses, toilets and drinking fountains and restaurants. For example Buses: All passenger stations in this state operated
Till was an African American schoolboy in Chicago, and he went to visit his uncle in Mississippi. He reportedly “wolf whistled” at a white grocery store attendant, Mrs. Bryant, and was kidnapped by her husband and her husband’s half brother that following night. The boy’s body, terribly battered, with a bullet hole in the head and a cotton-gin fan affixed to the n...
A landmark legal case that is proof of all the racial profiling that is present in such issues is the case Brandley v. Keeshan. In this case Clarance Brandley, a black high school janitor was accused of raping and murdering Cheryl Fergeson, a sixteen-year-old white student. He and another janitor had found her naked in the school’s loft. Once interrogations were conducted to figure out who was the one guilty of the crime the investigator told Brandley, “Since you’re the nigger, you’re elected.” This information stands for itself on showing that racial profiling was an is an issue within the criminal justice system, but that discrimination is only a small portion of what happened in the case. Brandley was also given a polygraph test and the examiner, having sixteen years of experience said he was not involved in the crime, but that information was dismissed. He was also interrogated for five hours in which they tried to make him please guilty, but Bradley did not give into the intimidation of the interrogation and kept saying he was innocent. In court, Brandley faced an all-white jury twice. During an interview, Brandley stated that black jurors had been taken out of the jury. The town where Brandley’s court was held was a town where Klu Klux Klan meetings still took place and the
“…Everybody jumped on him, and beat him senseless… Everybody was hitting him or kicking him. One guy was kicking at his spine. Another guy was hitting him on the side of his face… he was unconscious. He was bleeding. Everybody had blood on their forearms. We ran back up the hill laughing… He should have died… He lost so much blood he turned white. He got what he deserved…” (Ridgeway 167). The skinheads who were beating this man up had no reason to do so except for the fact that he was Mexican. Racism in this day and age is still as big of a problem as it was in the past, and as long as hate groups are still around to promote violence, society is never going to grow to love one another.
A study of race and jury trials in Florida published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that “conviction rates for black and white defendants are similar when there is at least some representation of blacks in the jury pool.” But all-white juries are a very different story—they convict blacks 16% more often than they convict whites (2).
Juror #10, a garage owner, segregates and divides the world stereotypically into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ‘Us’ being people living around the rich or middle-class areas, and ‘them’ being people of a different race, or possessing a contrasting skin color, born and raised in the slums (poorer parts of town). It is because of this that he has a bias against the young man on trial, for the young man was born in the slums and was victim to domestic violence since the age of 5. Also, the boy is of a Hispanic descent and is of a different race than this juror, making him fall under the juror’s discriminatory description of a criminal. This is proven on when juror #10 rants: “They don’t need any real big reason to kill someone, either. You know, they get drunk, and bang, someone’s lying in the gutter… most of them, it’s like they have no feelings (59).
Carolyn's husband, Roy Bryant, soon returned from business in those next few days. He heard from others that Till had made advances towards his wife. When he later asked his wife angrily, she claimed that Emmett had grabbed her, harassed her and whispered in her ear inappropriate things. Later Roy and his brother-in-law had gone all around Money looking for him. They finally figured out that Till was the nephew of Moses, the local preacher. They arrived at his house sometime at four in the morning demanding to see Emmett. When they found Emmett asleep they awoke him and forced them into their truck despite protest. What happened after is not completely known. What was testified in court by Bryant and MIlam, was that they only meant to teach him a lesson but he kept talking back and that angered them, and he was eventually shot after a while of torture. Three days later Emmetts body was found in the Tallahatchie river. The body was so messed up that he could not be identified by facial recognition. His uncle had identified him by a ring on his hand that belonged to Till’s late father. His body was sent home to Chicago and the government tried to get his body buried right away so no commotion was made. But his mother decided to have an open casket funeral. Mammie Bradley claimed that “Unless an example is made of the lynchers of Emmett it won’t be safe for any negro to walk the streets anywhere in
Stevenson, Bryan A. Illegal Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection. Rep. Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2010. Print.