More by accident than design, there’s a lot of legal news to report in the links below, a trend I expect to continue throughout 2017.
The law has always been a dicey business for poor people, people of color, immigrants, and a host of other marginalized groups. Bias within the legal system often seems more by design than accident, with a huge dollop of human idiosyncracy thrown in for good measure.
In the spirit of learning how weird it can all get, I’d point you to one of my favorite podcasts, More Perfect, a terrific mini-series from the creators of Radiolab about the Supreme Court.
Every episode is great, but for our purposes, I recommend “Object Anyway” a lively segment on the life and trial of Louisville, KY’s James Batson, a “fast-money,” breaking-and-entering type of guy, who became Supreme Court famous when the white prosecutor, in front of a white judge, eliminated all the black jurors from his jury pool, including one who had been sympathetic to his case.
Batson ended up getting twenty years.
This was thirty years ago. “At the time I had been doing some burglaries,” Batson admitted, but the one he was arrested for—breaking into a home to steal a purse—he says he didn’t do. So, he appealed the verdict, specifically addressing the all-white jury maneuver. The argument, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court, challenged the practice of using “peremptory strikes,” which allow lawyers to remove jurors from service without reason. The problem, his ragtag legal team discovered, was that prosecutors were doing it all over the country to racially stack juries.
Batson won. The Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky, that a prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenge in a criminal case may not be used to exclude jurors based only on their race. But that victory, known as the Batson Rule, has inspired an entirely new body of race-based pre-trial “best practices,” that seems to have only made the situation worse.
James Batson, interviewed extensively in the podcast, is amiable and entertaining – until you realize, of course, how serious the problems with biased juries were and continue to be. The podcast reveals the messy human reality that lies at the heart of any system.
But in the U.S. justice system, the human reality is uniquely complex. One African American defense attorney interviewed said that it all comes down to faith. “The rules say talk to jurors and find out what they think,” said Jeffrey Robinson. If we don’t follow that most basic rule, “we’re conceding that we are so divided by race that we will never be able to fix it. I’m not prepared to concede that.”