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A solution to the lack of diversity in the judicial system
Diversity issue in the criminal justice system
A solution to the lack of diversity in the judicial system
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Procedural History
In a Georgia Court, Timothy Foster was convicted of capital murder and penalized to death. During his trial, the State Court use peremptory challenges to strike all four black prospective jurors qualified to serve on the Jury. However, Foster argued that the use of these strikes was racially motivated, in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S.79. That led his claim to be rejected by the trial court, and the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed. The state courts rejected relief, and the Foster’s Batson claim had been adjudicated on direct appeal. Finally, his Batson claim had been failed by the court because it failed to show “any change in the facts sufficient to overcome”.
Essential Facts of the Case
The Foster v. Chatman case is about Timothy Foster, who is a deprived, mentally disabled, black adolescent accused of killing a white female. The major concern is his trial which included only white juries after the exclusion of the potential black jurors from jury service in his trial. The prosecution afterward ruled that Foster should be given a death sentence to prevent other individuals from similar projects. During the time, almost all the people in the projects were of the black race, including Timothy’s family. The jury ruled a death sentence to Foster.
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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
City of Pinellas Park v. Brown was a case brought to the District Court of Appeal of Florida, Second District by the plaintiff Brown. In this case, the Brown family sued the City of Pinellas Sheriff Department on the grounds of negligence that resulted in the tragic death of two Brown sisters during a police pursuit of a fleeing traffic violator Mr. Deady. The facts in this case are straight forward, and I shall brief them as logical as possible.
The Sixth Amendment states that the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury. However, Dexter was in jail for 25 years since 1982, and the appeal was still in process to the Supreme Court. Also, based on the jury selection on exhibit B, document one, there were only white people in the final jury, and African Americans were struck peremptory by prosecution. Dexter did not have an impartial jury because white people may favor his opposed side due to the different race. According to Batson v. Kentucky, the USSC also determined that peremptory challenges used to exclude jurors on the basis of race could be challenged by the defendant. It was not fair for Dexter to not have the same race people as him in the jury. In addition, the Sixth Amendment also says that both federal and state courts must provide a lawyer if the accused cannot afford to hire one. Even though Dexter did have an attorney, his attorney was not organized and prepared. The adequate attorney was not as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment because he admitted that “he has not been to the crime scene, or viewed the crime scene photographs…has not viewed the prosecution’s witness list.” He had not done anything that could help defend Dexter. He didn't even call witnesses in the court to help Dexter. Strickland v. Washington also supports this because the court upheld the defendant’s conviction that his rights had been violated when his lawyer did not provide enough evidence to avoid the death
From the Ferguson, Missouri case of an officer “wrongfully” protecting himself to the Texas DWI case involving the father murdering the murderer of his sons, the media helps play a larger role on the scale to emphasize more attraction to the topic of the moment. With the increasing complexity and reach of the law, to nullify is to be a useful tool in a democratic society. However, a verdict should be based on the law as decided by the whole people, not the few who make up the jury of a particular case. Although judges and legal scholars take a variety of positions of the subject of jury nullification, the validity of the practice is said to follow logically from several aspects of our judicial system. In the general, judges are unwilling in most states to even inform juries the option of
Both trials were perfect examples of how the people of Alabama were above the law and could do whatever they wanted to the black people and get away with it. In both trials, lynch mobs were formed to threaten the black people who were accused. Judge Hornton tried many times to move the case to a different place so that a fair trial could take place and not be interrupted by the racist people. Finally, he was granted to move the case even though the lynch mobs threatened to kill everyone who was involved in the case if it were to be moved. In this essay, the bias and racism in both trials are going to be clarified and compared to each other.
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).
Overview: Alabama, March 25, 1931, nine African-American teens were arrested after a fight with several white teens on a freight train going through Alabama. After throwing the white teens off the train, they were accused of raping two white females. They were arrested and taken to the county seat of Scottsboro, charged, convicted and sentenced to the maximum penalty under Alabama law – death. All the defendants were tried and convicted in three separate groups, with each trial lasting one day. Eight were sentenced to death and the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed seven of the sentences. The issue of this case is whether or not their due process rights were violated by the denial of the right to counsel and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment (Powell v. Alabama, 1932 & Zalman,
In modern-day America the issue of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is controversial because there is substantial evidence confirming both individual and systemic biases. While there is reason to believe that there are discriminatory elements at every step of the judicial process, this treatment will investigate and attempt to elucidate such elements in two of the most critical judicial junctures, criminal apprehension and prosecution.
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).
The court system includes the judges, jury, prosecutors and defense attorneys. The Attorneys convince the suspects to take plea bargains, the judges are sometimes unfair in the decisions they make, and the prosecutors overlook exculpatory evidence. Picking cotton shows in detail some common errors of the court system. During Ronald Cotton 's first trial, His Attorney, Phil Moseley, tried to bring a memory expert to testify on the unreliability of memory but the judge denied his request. After Ronald 's case was overturned by the supreme court, he got a new trial in another court which had even more problems and bias. First, there was racial prejudice during the jury selection. “Four black people from the community got called in for jury duty. The judge himself dismissed one of them and then Mr turner made sure none of the rest sat on my jury” Ronald cotton stated. Because he was black, the four jurors were dismissed and he was left with an all white jury and two white Alternates. Second, the judge “Held something called a “voir dire” hearing, which Phil explained meant he would have to put up all the evidence about Poole in front of the Judge, but not the Jury”(129). Also, Ronald Cotton 's defense attorney explained to the judge the parallelism between Bobby Poole 's case and the rape Ronald Cotton was charged with. Despite the weak physical evidence against Ronald Cotton, the
Robinson trial; (2) prejustice and its effects on the processes of the law and society; (3)
The American legal system was put into place by the Judiciary Act of 1789. This act was established with the intent of creating structure and jurisdiction within the local and federal court systems (Bagwell). However, some of the lower courts were found to be vulnerable to prejudice. Such forms of prejudice were evident in Tom Robinson’s court case from To Kill a Mockingbird. Tom Robinson’s case exemplified injustice within the lower court, where an all-white jury decided the verdict. If there was an all-black jury present, there might have been a different verdict, but whites would still have established their own form of vigilante justice.
A white man is charged for severely beating a sixteen-year-old black teen he found trespassing on his property. Evidence strongly shows the white man did beat the teen but the jury refuses to find the defendant guilty based on their belief that black teen “had it coming” and that “black teens trespassing are most likely up to no good.” The man is set free.
Stevenson, Bryan A. Illegal Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection. Rep. Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2010. Print.
I think the court was biased in this case and one of the examples that impressed me and brought me to this opinion was the note by one of the lawyers that was later seen by Mr. Foster. In the note he numbered each black juror (B#1, B#2, B#3, and so
For instance, the 1972 Furman V. Georgia case abolished the death penalty for four years on the grounds that capital punishment was extensive with racial inequalities (Latzer 21). Over twenty five years later, those inequalities are higher than ever. The statistics says that African Americans are twelve percent of the U.S. population, but are 43 percent of the prisoners on death row. Although blacks make up 50 percent of all murder victims, 83 percent of the victims in death penalty cases are white. Since 1976 only ten executions involved a white defendant who had killed a bl...