From Lawyers to Judges: Implicit Bias in the Courtroom
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, one in twenty five people on death row is likely innocent (Ferner).How could there be so many wrongful convictions? One of the largest causes may be bias within the courts. Implicit bias in the American judicial system may seriously impact the underprivileged in receiving impartial verdicts in the legal system and access to quality lawyers.
The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity recognizes implicit bias as “the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner”(p1). This bias is often undetected by the person who holds it, making it difficult to confront. In fact,
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Judges are among the elite in American society, with average salaries ranging from $105,050 to $204,599 a year. The median household, by comparison, made only $45,445 in 2010 (Neitz 142). As a result of this, and the status given to judges, many judges have “life experience different than those of lower-income people” (Neitz 143). Because empathy lies among those closest to oneself, it is considerably more difficult for judges to have an understanding of the experiences of the lower class. Judges are also affected by the expectation to remain impassive in rulings. Indeed, many judges pride themselves on being unemotional, or even state it a necessary quality for good judges. According to one judge, “Empathy, of course, should play no role in judge’s determination of what the law is . . . We do not determine the law or decide on cases based on ‘feelings’ or emotions or whether we empathise with one side or the other” (Wistrich). However, no one can ever truly throw away their biases and leanings (Sarine). Because of this, judges’ biases are nearly impossible to confront, they instead flourish in darkness. And juries are no better. Minority exclusion is common, and arduous to address. After all, it is often unclear when juror exclusion is biased, especially when bogus reasons for juror exclusion are accepted. Some jurors have been taken to …show more content…
Many are unable to afford such services, leading to two thirds of critical cases without lawyers (Bronner). Overloaded, the financial aid programs created to assist citizens are forced to turn away those in need due to overload. Lawyers, to make money, are concentrated in urban, wealthy areas instead of the poor and rural areas that require most help. All of this culminates in a disheartening way: the US is ranked 66th out of 98 countries on lawyer access (Bergmark). Even for citizens that can obtain a public defender, there is struggle. America's public defenders are severely overworked, tackling 5.5 million total cases per year. Many are forced to take on hundreds or even thousands of cases more than the American Bar Association recommended number of 150 felonies or 400 misdemeanors (Van Brunt). As a result, defenders turn down cases from overload. Despite the high caseloads, defenders are severely underfunded, and forced to work long hours to make up for it. Consequently, defenders have no time for cases and sometimes even first meet their clients in court. These defenders spend less than hour per case to have time to finish all of them. According to Tina Peng, a New Orleans public
It is more difficult for governments to provide adequate salaries to public defense lawyers and the result is that these lawyers are often more inexperienced (Fairfax, 2013). Since the amount of defendants who are unable to afford private counsel has increased, public defense lawyers are also overworked. It is not uncommon for public defense lawyers to juggle hundreds of cases simultaneously (Fairfax, 2013). In other words, the system is unable to handle the volume and has therefore resorted to avoiding the trial process whenever
Some common ethnic stereotypes are derived out of implicit social cognition, also known as implicit bias. The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity defines implicit bias in their report titled, “Understanding Implicit Bias”. “… Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that effect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner” (“Understanding Implicit Bias”). Stereotypes from implicit bias contrast with others because they are created in one’s subconscious, not necessarily from a palpable event or reason. Implicit biases can become rooted in a person’s subconscious in several different manners. “In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations,” says the Kirwan Institute (“Understanding Implicit Bias”). The manner in which the American media portrays specific groups of people influence the implicit biases of the American people. These biases causes people to have feelings or attitudes about other races, ethnicities, age groups, and appearances (“Understanding Implicit
While lawmakers try to structure a system to uphold fair punishments, some people within the system seem to taint the judicial pool. Just Mercy is a book that talks about injustice in the legal system. The author describes cases and clients that he’s worked with that were up against all odds. As seen within the book “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, some enforcers tend to prey on certain races and act more biased with others. This dilemma can lead to many cases of injustice, just based on people’s thought
This problem affects everyone, but only benefits four types of people; the judges, the lawyers, the clients paying thousands more to the lawyers to win their case, and the police. Judges today are not playing fair, and they are accepting bribes from equally corrupt lawyers that are desperate to win a case and improve their case winnings over their losses. The lawyers are asking for more money from the clients so that they can secretly hand over cash to the lawyers and ask for “favors” in the courtroom. With all of this injustice, comes fear implanted in the client, who is then willing to spend more on a lawyer to guarantee their success in a case; “fear and injustice equals more money for lawyers and judges”(Sachs).
The U.S. Court systems in America base its whole judicial system around “blind justices” but is justice always blind? Since day one, justice has been portrayed as impartial. That the U.S. judicial system is represented by an elegant lady holding a set of scales in one hand and a sword in her other, while wearing a blindfold. She carries the balances symbolizing fairness and the sword symbolizing power and authority, and she wears the blindfold, symbolizing objective justice for all people, without preference of discrimination, regardless of identity, wealth, power, status, position, or circumstances. However, is this always the case? One point we can stress upon is eyewitness testimony or expert testimony. It is often said that the principle danger of adversary expertise is “motivational bias”. As expert witnesses are
It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.' [Juror 8, page 53] Perhaps this best sums up the basis of Twelve Angry Men' by Reginald Rose. This play is about a young delinquent on trial for the murder of his abusive father. The jury must find him guilty if there is no reasonable doubt, and in turn, sentence him to death. I don't envy your job. You are faced with a grave responsibility.' [Judge, page 1]
people in these 21st century society wonder, “When is Justice to be done?” For district attorneys,
In the last couple of years, many Americans including political leaders have agreed that our criminal justice system is deeply flawed, unsustainable and inefficient and needs to be reformed. Our criminal justice system was “created to keep communities safe, to respect and restore victims and to return offenders who leave prison to be self-sufficient and law-abiding” (DeRoche, 2012). However, it is not only the offenders but the criminal justice system itself. There are five major problems within our criminal justice system. The first and biggest problem is our overpopulated prisons. Each year millions of people are incarcerated in local, state, and federal prisons. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Color People
Implicit Bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions unconsciously. (Kirwan, 2015) The implicit bias, which includes both favorable and unfavorable being personal, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or voluntary control. The implicit interaction subconscious
.... J., & Langton, L. (2010, Sep/Oct). A national assessment of public defender office caseloads []. Judicature, 94(2), 87-91. Retrieved from
Taking an Implicit association test may not be something that we would want to base any serious decisions off of; it is a useful tool in being able to learn about ourselves better. By being made aware that we may unconsciously hold views that we are not proud of, we can inoculate ourselves and make a personal change for the better.
Implicit bias has negatively impacted our society, whether we realize it or not. Efren Perez(2016), a professor at Vanderbilt University, defines implicit bias as “an umbrella term for a variety of attitudes, beliefs, knowledge and stereotypes that we all carry to some degree. They tend to be automatically triggered, hard to control and can often influence what we say and do without our awareness” (para. 3). This has a negative impact on society because it can influence our viewpoints on important issues such as immigration, politics, and civil rights no matter how unbiased we think we are. Pérez(2016) explains “our mind picks up on patterns that we see in society, the media and other places and forms snap judgments before we have time to process all the information in a more deliberative and controlled manner” (para. 4). While we may not always view ourselves as prejudice or racist, implicit bias lies beneath the surface of our conscious and affects how we make
This reveals the presence of bias in many experimental cases that overshadows the significance of other determining factors taken into account in actual cases. This ultimately results in questioning the existence of integrity and fairness in all court cases, real or simulated, and
Elections of the judiciary are encouraging political and judges to work together, as they have to clarify their political position during their campaign. Furthermore, under the rule of law, transparency of the law is of great importance. However, in this case as people would be aware of the judges predisposition, it would be transparency of the potential interpretation of the law and not the law itself. Furthermore, the same sort of evidence, as explored in economic conditions becomes a factor. Again, evidence from the US shows that elected judges during re-election terms will grant success in litigation to influential people
Unsurprisingly, implicit bias training may be particularly successful at challenging prejudices that exist in individual’s subconscious. Simply put, its primary goal is to first acknowledge the existence of a prejudice and then attempt to use newly acquired awareness of the bias in order to challenge its effect (Mundy 69). Evidence shows that gender diversity training can have a positive impact on diversification. For instance,