Race and its Implications in the Criminal Justice System

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Recommended: Racial discrimination in the united states criminal justice system

Race has continually been an important issue within the United States and most predominantly the criminal justice system. Racial tension in America is often thought of as being white versus black, even though that is not in fact the case. African-Americans view the system as favoring whites while trying to keep them at the bottom. While whites claim that the criminal justice system is colorblind, blacks clearly do not feel this way; whites underestimate the racial divide in the criminal justice system (Bikel, 2005). The highly publicized OJ Simpson case is well-known for being a case more about race than murder. In the 1999 Gallup Poll, 74% of people said that OJ either “probably” or “definitely” committed murder. A black male on trial for allegedly killing two whites, his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman, was left free not because the jury thought he was innocent but because they were fighting the system that has so long oppressed blacks, primarily black men. This paper is to show that OJ owes his “not guilty” verdict to his race and not his innocence.
Immediately after Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were found dead, on June 12, 1994, outside Brown’s home in California OJ Simpson was a suspect (Linder, 2000). He was a retired football player then living a short distance from Brown’s home. Being that he was a black male accused of killing two whites, the racial tensions were already brewing.
The importance of race in this case was thought about before the start of the trial especially concerning the jury. The prosecution had decided to conduct the jury selection in downtown Los Angeles even though the crime had happened in Santa Monica. Having a trial in LA meant having a jury composed largely of minorities wh...

... middle of paper ...

...ustices of the corrupt criminal justice system. Because of the publicity of the case, it was easy to use OJ as an informant for all of America, showing the inequalities American society is built on.

Works Cited

Bikel, O. (2005). The O.J. Verdict. PBS. Retrieved December 3, 2013, From: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oj/view/.
Gallup. (1995). Opinion Polls on the O. J. Simpson Trial. UMKC School of Law. Retrieved December 3, 2013, From:
Linder, D. (2000). The Trial of Orenthal James Simpson. UMKC School of Law. Retrieved December 3, 2013, From: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Simpson/Simpsonaccount.htm.
Jones, T.L. (2007). The O.J. Simpson Murder Trial. TruTV. Retrieved December 3, 2013, From: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders /famous/simpson/index_1.html.

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