The Criminal Justice Systen

The Criminal Justice System: Unfair to Minorities and the Less Social Elite

The criminal justice system of the United States is said to be a fair system. The system is not supposed to discriminate against different races, religious groups or social classes, everyone is supposed to get the same equal treatment. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Many different types of people including African American’s, Hispanics and the poor are getting unfair treatment in the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system discriminates against certain races and social classes.

One of the most famous cases of racial injustice of the criminal justice system is the case of Rodney King. Rodney King was a black taxi driver who was violently arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department in March of 1991. California Highway patrol spotted Rodney King driving at excessive speeds and when they pulled him over, he did not obey their commands to step out of his vehicle. He was then beaten repeatedly by PR24 baton ( also known as a police stick) and was later struck twice with a taser gun. Following the Rodney King incident , The Report of the Los Angeles Police Department (1991) found that “there was excessive use of force by Los Angeles Police officers and that this was compounded by racism and bias.” One quarter of the 960 Los Angeles Police officers that were surveyed agreed that officers were racial toward minorities. Witnesses who testified said that the Los Angeles Police Department as a whole “tolerated discriminatory treatment .“ They also said that they detained African American and Latino men who fit generalized descriptions of subjects.

In the New York State Judicial Commission on Minorities report (1991), a panel of judges, attorney’s and law professors found that “there are two justice systems in the courts of New York State; one for white’s and a very different one for minorities and the poor” (p.1). They also found “inequality, disparate treatment, and injustice based on race.” The panel also concluded that “minority cases often take only four or five minutes in court, and that black defendants outside of New York City frequently have their cases heard by an all white jury. Below is a table that shows the number of inmates n state or federal prisons or local jails.(5)

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Is there racial discrimination in in the jury selection process? Certainty. The Dallas Morning News examined fifteen capital murder trials from 1980 through 1986 and reveled that prosecutors excluded 90percent of African Americans qualified for jury selection. A study of the federal death penalty by the U.S. Department of Justice released in September, 2000 found 80 percent of federal defendants who faced capital charges were members of racial minorities, as were 74 percent of convicted defendants for whom prosecutors recommended the death penalty

In the case of Strauder V. West Virginia (1880), the court took down a statute that limited jury service to white men on the grounds that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. This ruling however, did not stop some states from attempting to keep an all white jury. For example, in Delaware, jury selection was drawn from lists of taxpayers. Even though African Americans were eligible for jury selection, they were hardly ever selected because, as explained by state authorities, few African American’s in the state were intelligent, experienced, or moral enough to serve as jurors. Some states still also pulled jurors names from registered voters, the Department of Motor Vehicles or property tax rolls, and for some area’s racial minorities are less likely to be registered voters, own automobiles or own property. Therefore, the people who end up in the jury pool are middle-class white people.

In 1985, Sheri Lynn Johnson, a Cornwell law professor reviewed a dozen mock-jury trials. She concluded that the "race of the defendant significantly and directly affects the determination of guilt." In the studies, identical simulation trials were held, sometimes with white defendants and sometimes with African American defendants. Sheri Lynn Johnson found that white jurors were more likely to find an African American defendant guilty more likely than a white defendant, even though the mock trials were based on the same crime and the same evidence. She also found that African American jurors found the white defendants guilty more than the black defendants.

In an article found in the New York Times newspaper, a clear case of racial discrimination is shown. Thomas Miller, an African American was charged with shooting two white hotel clerks during a robbery in 1985. One of the hotel clerks died and Thomas Miller , 50, was supposed to be executed by the State of Texas on February 21. He appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court because he felt that the jury that convicted him was chosen using “racial discriminatory standards”. The District Attorney’s office opposed the appeal and stated that there was no evidence of any racial discrimination. Yet the jury consisted of nine whites, one Filipino, one Hispanic, and one African American. To date, both state and federal courts have upheld his death sentence, saying that no racial discrimination occurred during his jury selection.

In a two year period in the state of Maryland, African Americans made up 79.2 percent of the drivers stopped and searched by the police on Interstate 95, even though they made up only 17.5 percent of the drivers who violated traffic laws. (John Lamberth, Driving while Black). A 1998 study of police stop and search patterns in England and Wales by the British Government's Home Office found that African American’s were 7.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites. Statistics also show that minorities are much more likely to be stopped and searched. According to the Criminal Evidence Act of 2002/2003, 9,000 African American’s were stopped and searched opposed to 700 white’s who were stopped and searched. Below is a chart that shows the proportion of adults stopped by police according to ethnic groups. (7)

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Statistics show that one fourth of all black males and 16 percent of Latino’s can expect to spend time in prison sometime during their lifetime opposed to only four percent of white males. Something even more shocking is the fact that a third of all African American males, age 20-29