Racism And The Justice System

Racism is still an issue in the United States, and this impacts everything from the justice system to what is taught in schools.
Despite the fact slavery and Jim Crow laws are now gone, racism still exists in the United States. People of color face microaggressions daily, deal with discrimination in politics, and have to deal with racism (overt or covert) from others all the time. The paper “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test” found that most people associate whiteness and white-sounding names with positive things and blackness or black-sounding names with negative things. Another paper “Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing” found that people are more likely to spot a criminal
Being unconsciously trained to think of black people as more criminal than white people leads to unconscious racial profiling. In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union found that black people are .73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, despite blacks and whites having similar usage rates. And it’s not just getting arrested that black people have to worry about. A Duke University study found that with an all-white jury, black people face an 81% conviction rate, as opposed to a 66% conviction rate for white people. And a University of Washington study found that a black person is three times more likely than a white person to be sentenced to capital punishment. Overall, black people are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and killed by the justice system than white people. Given the huge differences, it seems unlikely that this tendency is coincidental. America’s racism heavily impacts the justice
As Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, professor of law, wrote, juries are one of the most important parts of the judicial branch. A jury decides whether or not a person is guilty, and because of the inclusion of jury nullification, can be viewed as a citizen’s path to directly impact democracy . However, POC are often denied that pathway. As Bryan A. Stevenson said, “…there is perhaps no arena of public life or governmental administration where racial discrimination is more widespread, apparent, and seemingly tolerated than in the selection of juries.” Many lawyers choose jury members depending on race, leading to the exclusion of black jury members. This has been extensively documented throughout history. A 1963 training manual stated that future Dallas prosecutors should “not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or well educated.” But this isn’t just a problem of the past. In 2012, Michigan State University published a paper that found prosecutors struck eligible black jury members about 2.5 times as often as they struck eligible non-black jury members. In fact, as recently as September of last year, the Supreme Court dealt with the case Foster vs. Chatman, where they reviewed a capital punishment trial of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a young black man accused of murdering an elderly white woman. During the original trial, the prosecuter had struck