Twisted Justice

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

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Part I: “‘bloodthirsty eagerness’ to impose the death penalty”

• Source: Adam Liptak, “Ruling Likely to Spur Convictions in Capital Cases,” New York Times, June 9, 2007.

In capital cases, only people willing to apply the death penalty are allowed to serve on juries. According to the New York Times, past research has shown that these pro-death-penalty jurors are more likely to find a defendant guilty, and they also tend to be more racist, sexist and homophobic than other jurors.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court makes it easier to eliminate anyone from a jury in a capital case who is not enthusiastically pro-death penalty. The Court argued that it would be legitimate to exclude a juror who “stated six times that he could consider the death penalty or follow the law,” because the juror did not display, as an appeals court judge stated, a “bloodthirsty eagerness” to apply the death penalty.

Once again the current Supreme Court has put on display their twisted sense of justice. Justice John Paul Stevens captures the problem well:

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority had “gotten it horribly backwards” by creating the impression that “trial courts should be encouraging the inclusion of jurors who will impose the death penalty rather than only ensuring the exclusion of those who say that, in all circumstances, they cannot.”

The practices upheld by the Court will lead to exclusion of at least half of potential jurors from capital cases.

When he was on the Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall went even further and objected to the exclusion of anti-death penalty jurors. He argued, rightly in my view,

The exclusion of jurors opposed to the death penalty, he said, “allows the state a special advantage in those prosecutions where the charges are most serious and the possible punishments the most severe.”

It seems to me that excluding half of the potential jurors corrupts the ideal that one should have a jury of one’s peers.

Part II: For the Justice Department, Religion is In, Race is Out

• Source: Neil A. Lewis, “Justice Department Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission,” New York Times, June 14, 2007.

In pursuing civil rights cases, it should not be a matter of choosing religious discrimination or racial discrimination, but with the current administration, this seems to be the case. The Bush Justice Department is aggressively pursuing cases it defines as religious discrimination but displaying little interest in race-based hate crimes and voting rights violations against blacks.

Some of the cases the Justice Department has pursued are questionable as to whether they are really examples of religious discrimination. For example, the Times illustrates one recent questionable initiative:

Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

The government is therefore fighting to allow religious groups to discriminate.

Along with this focus on religion, the Justice Department is recruiting more from religious universities and less from the top-ranked universities than in the past.

Part III: Throwing Out a Case for Having Too Much Evidence of Discrimination

• Source: Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Limit Discrimination Suits Over Pay,” New York Times, May 29, 2007.

Lilly M. Ledbetter was the only female among 14 men in a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala. For almost 20 years she was paid less than her male co-workers--including those with less seniority than she had. The Supreme Court decided that she could only sue Goodyear within the first 180 days of experiencing pay discrimination. Of course, it is just about impossible for someone to be certain of pay discrimination and to have evidence for a case in this six-months time frame. The Court has made it a lot more comfortable for employers who discriminate.

Sadly, we will see more twisted justice from the Supreme Court for years to come. Register and vote for an administration with a better sense of right and wrong.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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