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Jarmak posted:That racially disparate outcomes in jury selection are second order effects from racial disparity in other aspects of the system/society. That the selection process itself is not broken as some posters have declared, and loving with it is going to cause more harm then good. Same, but for movie theaters, restaurants, beaches, housing, and employment.
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Nov 5, 2015 01:24
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 23:34 |
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Jarmak posted:You've still yet to establish this fact pattern whatsoever. What's your alternative? You think prosecutors are intentionally hurting their cases by wasting their challenges on the personal satisfaction of keeping the black man down? You obviously know this isn't how racism works, so what's the point of even saying it. Someone doesn't have to be cackling and twirling a mustache about successfully keeping the black man down another day to be a racist or to discriminate or to let racial prejudice affect how they do their job, you know that right?
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Nov 9, 2015 08:26
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Jarmak posted:I already said I didn't think one exists The thing is, the whole reason that institutions like the justice system with all its procedures and protections is even necessary is to ensure fair and just outcomes despite the biases and irrationality that afflict individual human judgments, that's why we have it instead of throwing people to the mob to exact justice. The answer to discovering bias or corruption in one of our institutions is never "oh just eradicate that bias from all of human society", that's impossible, that will never happen. The only way to address a discovery that one of the systems in an institution is vulnerable to biases is to fix the system to make it more robust, not revolutionize all human modes of thought. This isn't even a progressive thing, this is just a basic functioning-of-society thing. When you find pilots or doctors are prone to a certain type of error, you improve training or procedures or oversight within that profession to eliminate it, you don't throw up your hands and say "welp can't fix this until we first fix our whole society and education system and parenting methods until people just don't make this type of mistake anymore", that's ludicrous. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 02:39
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 No point in reinforcing cockpit doors I guess, let's just fix all of the underlying problems that create terrorism, and then all this hijacking trouble will be over. You will never eliminate bias and prejudice from society. Saying that a fair and equitable justice system will have to wait until prejudice is gone is just absurd, sorry.
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Nov 11, 2015 04:37
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Why not do something similar to what other multiethnic societies do in power-sharing agreements, something like what we already do under the UCMJ by allowing an enlisted defendant to demand that at least one-third of the jury be made up of enlisted servicemembers. If ethnic bias in jury selection is a problem, allow the defendant the right to demand that some minimum proportion of the jury be made up of people who self-identified as his ethnic group in the last US census or whatever. Make the jury pools bigger if you have to. Then the prosecutor is still free to use whatever peremptory strikes he wants if he gets a "bad feeling" about someone and he can keep going through jurors until he finds enough black people he likes to meet that proportion, that should solve the problem unless he just gets a bad feeling about all black people. A fair and equitable justice system is such a fundamentally important part of society that there's no defense for tolerating demonstrable systematic bias against people for something as pedestrian as skin color.
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Nov 11, 2015 04:54
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How does giving a defendant the right to demand a proportion of the jury be made up of his own ethnic group (in the face of proven discrimination against his ethnic group in jury selection in order to bias the justice system against him and deny him an equitable trial) constitute creating special classes of people who get legal privileges based on skin color? And how is the status quo: the unspoken ubiquitous exclusion of black people from juries not a de facto creation of special classes of people who get legal privileges based on skin color, in your mind? E: If you think peremptory strikes are too important to get rid of then okay, but in the face of evidence that they're used to secretly racially tilt the makeup of juries, we either need to require prosecutors to give a valid reason for every strike, or allow peremptory strikes but give the defense the option to require some minimal racial makeup of the jury. One of the two here man, because the alternative is deliberately building bias into our criminal justice system, which is destructive to any idea of a free and just society. You say we should just fix all racial inequality in the country instead, but not only is that practically impossible, but also a biased justice system contributes greatly to racial inequities in society because of the devastating effect wrongful convictions and criminal records have on minority employment prospects, families, and neighborhoods. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 09:03
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If the status-quo is giving people legal privileges or disadvantages based on their skin color (and it is) because of private biases and prejudice from prosecutors, we're never going to be able to address it by not noticing skin color. Is this seriously all you've got, "no you're the real racist"? Be a little imaginative please. My proposal doesn't even give anyone special privileges because it is that any defendant would have the right to demand a minimum proportion of their ethnic group on the jury. Is an enlisted person's right to demand enlisted people on the jury a "special privilege"? "Whoa whoa, it's just coincidence that you're being judged by an all-white jury who hates you, I didn't even notice! Maybe you're the racist who is obsessed with color, hey?" 
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 09:17
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Those wouldn't be peremptory strikes though, if you're ranting about how much you hate the justice system then the lawyer wouldn't waste a peremptory strike on you, he'd strike you for cause. It's obviously not a perfect solution: you're right ideally the racial makeup of a jury shouldn't matter. But we don't live in that world, we live in a world where it does matter and where prosecutors, sometimes deliberately like the 1987 case or sometimes unconsciously because of ingrained prejudice, tilt the racial makeup of juries against black defendants. Meddling with the racial composition of juries is something that already commonly happens, only instead of being done explicitly to protect the rights of defendants, it's done individually and secretly across the country to disadvantage them. The quota you're worried about already exists, only it's unpredictable and selected according to the random (un?)conscious whims of different DA's scattered around the country. Prosecutors are already making decisions about racial composition, only now it's left up to their individual biases and prejudices. This is a weak point in the system that allows human biases to creep into the institution we created to remove biases in order to ensure just an equitable outcomes. We could take that decision completely out of the hands of humans by eliminating peremptory strikes and require all prosecutors to show cause. Or we could institute oversight and have some kind of remedy available if the defense can show that the prosecutor has a pattern of racial discrimination in jury selection. Or if it's just really really important that the prosecution be allowed to dismiss black jurors on the basis of intuition, then why not allow the defense to demand a minimum proportion of the defendant's race and keep bringing black/white/Chinese/whatever replacements until the prosecutor finds ones he's happy with or runs out of strikes? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Nov 11, 2015 |
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Nov 11, 2015 10:48
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For readability's sake I'm going to condense all this pearl-clutching into a few points, please let me know if I've misrepresented you. 1) You want discrimination on juries?!?!?! No I don't, but this pearl of your is worthless because it already provably exists and is not going away, and you've already said you're fine with the status quo of discrimination in jury selection continuing until society stops being racist one day. Since you're already okay with prosecutors tilting the racial composition of juries, let's bring it in to the system, confront it with eyes open, and use it to protect the civil rights of the accused rather than subvert them. Ignoring the problem and clinging to neutral wording doesn't get rid of racial quotas, it just shifts the control of them to the unaccountable biases and prejudices of individual prosecutors, which is not conducive to fair and equitable justice. 2) Juries should be neutral finders of fact with no assumptions about race! Again, this is not the case, the assumption that's actually happening in practice isn't one of neutral finders of fact, but one of "black people can't be neutral and must be excluded". Since that's a bad assumption, we should correct that by some method, perhaps by requiring prosecutors to put black people on juries even if they don't want to, although I am open to other suggestions. 3) Are you saying only people of their own ethnic group can judge them, and aren't there too many tiny groups in the world? No, this is the densest possible interpretation of what I said, so no surprise that you chose it. I never said that only Japanese can judge Japanese: the bias that's actually happening is prosecutors assume some ethnic groups can never be trusted to judge and excluding them for that reason. Since my proposal is intended to remedy that specific bias, we don't need to drill down to whether someone is a descendant of slaves or a recent Xhosa immigrant or Chinese or Korean, because prosecutors aren't getting into tiny details like that either. They're relying on broad physical characteristics like "are they too dark", so the US census categories are granular enough for this purpose and we don't have to go searching for 12 people from every tiny tribe, obviously. 4)  Won't those slanty-eyed South Asians impose Sharia law and honor killings on us all?!?!?!?  What the hell. I work with plenty of them here in South Asia and none of my co-workers support honor killings so I think we can trust the usual interview system to weed out any few who do and we don't have to defend Western civilization by banning all shifty Muslim Malays from juries juuuuuuuust yet homes.
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Nov 12, 2015 01:39
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No you wouldn't, if only 1% of the population is Asian, they're going to make up a comparably small percentage of court cases as defendants as well so there won't be much demand for jurors. In the case where there's only one black guy in the whole town, well that problem already exists, plenty of times a town is too small for a jury, or the defendant too well-known to everyone in town, or media coverage has saturated it until there you can't find anyone without prior knowledge of the case, and we just get the jury from somewhere else. Not being able to find a jury is a well-known common problem with already-established solutions.
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Nov 12, 2015 06:40
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Muscle Tracer posted:Why would this rule not be just as easily applicable to people of all census-recognized ethnic groups? It's not a "privilege" if it is applied to everyone. I imagine it's similar to how the Voting Rights Act creates a "racial entitlement" that lets black people block southern states from closing all polling places in black counties. White people don't need to file vra suits so clearly the law is racist.
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Nov 12, 2015 10:05
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 23:34 |
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To keep juror fraud from happening, jurors need to bring their notice and a photo ID to the nearest DMV
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Nov 15, 2015 15:15
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