Bryan Stevenson on Racism and Bias in the US Justice System According to the Georgia Innocence Project, a black person is 12 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of a drug related crime compared to a white person.This means that we live in a system that convicts people of a crime with a certain type of physical feature instead of convicting based on fact and evidence. This trend extends beyond just drug-related crimes and has ended up with thousands of people being wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, based on things like race and bias. This can be traced back all the way to the abolishment of slavery, and the creation of the Jim Crow laws, which made it legal to segregate people by race. This has created the ideal environment …show more content…
Before Bryan Stevenson entered the legal field, people and inmates were condemned and convicted based on bias and racism. There are many opportunities in the United States legal system for bias to appear. We have seen throughout the history of this legal system bias in judges and juries during supposedly unbiased, fair legal trials. By observing these occasions, Bryan Stevenson remarks that “We have a system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent”(When Whites don’t get it). This evidence supports the main claim by showing that the US justice system, with its moving parts, tends to allow bias and favor towards a certain group of people. This creates an unfair advantage to people that either have money or know the people involved in the legal system in an environment that was designed to be fair. This can cause people to be unfairly convicted or cause the wrong punishment to be issued. Furthermore, it is known that in the US, people of all colors commit crimes. But a study in Seattle found that black people make up 16% of drug dealers, but account for over 60% of arrests (when Whites don’t get …show more content…
Furthermore, Bryan Stevenson has fought many of these cases personally, bringing many of them to the Supreme Court. Perhaps his most impactful case that he won was the case of McMillian vs Alabama, which has been made into a book and a movie, Just Mercy. The story follows an innocent black man, Walter McMillian, who was wrongfully accused of a crime and put on death row because of the color of his skin, According to Nigel Smith, Just Mercy follows the story of freeing Walter McMillian, a wrongfully convicted black man from Alabama who was sentenced to death for murdering a white woman, despite 6 black witnesses who testified he didn’t do it (Nigel Smith). This quote proves that people are fine to accuse people of something they didn’t do, just because of something like bias or racism. This type of injustice sparks a response from Bryan Stevenson, who strives to rid our justice system of this type of bias. As Bryan wins more and more cases similar to this one, it sparks change throughout our judicial system and brings to light the racism and bias that has plagued our justice
In the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson is a memoir where Bryan Stevenson guides us through his life as a lawyer for those who are death sentence. From 1983 when he was student at Harvard Law to 2013 where he lost a client he was defending for years , he takes us through several cases he has taken over the years and showed how they personally impacted him as not only as a lawyer , but a person as well.
There have been different outcomes for different racial and gender groups in sentencing and convicting criminals in the United States criminal justice system. Experts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to many of these inequalities. Minority defendants are charged with ...
We can conclude with her analyses that the criminal justice in America is biased an even though I don’t agree with the suggestion Alexander has heard from other people that mass incarceration is a “conspiracy to put blacks back in their place” (p.5). It is clear that the justice system in the US is not completely fair, and that collective action must arise to struggle it.
Just Mercy’s Bryan Stevenson exposes some of these disparities woven around his presentation of the Walter McMillian case, and the overrepresentation of African-American men in our criminal justice system. His accounts of actors in the criminal justice system such as Judge Robert E. Lee and the D.A. Tom Chapman who refused to open up the case or provide support regardless of the overwhelmingly amount of inconsistencies found in the case. The fact that there were instances where policemen paid people off to testify falsely against McMillian others on death row significantly supports this perpetuation of racism. For many of the people of color featured in Stevenson’s book, the justice system was unfair to them wrongfully or excessively punishing them for crimes both violent and nonviolent compared to their white counterparts. Racism towards those of color has caused a “lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers” and ultimately leads to the mass incarceration of this population (Stevenson, 2014, p. 141). Moreover the lack of diversity within the jury system and those in power plays into the already existing racism. African-American men are quickly becoming disenfranchised in our country through such racist biases leading to over 1/3 of this population “missing” from the overall American population because they are within the criminal justice
Just Mercy touches on the idea of racial inequality and profiling the modern day american justice system by bringing us to a variety of cases that demonstrated this injustice. Bryan Stevenson also referenced an experience he personally had where he was being targeted by authorities for no good reason other than racial profiling. This theme of racial injustice and profiling connects Just Mercy to To Kill a Mockingbird. This idea is brought upon in To Kill a Mockingbird with Tom Robinson’s court case in which he is accused of committing rape. Many people judged Atticus Finch for defending Tom, not because of the allegations of committing rape, but rather the fact that he was defending a black man. Further proving the point that the contents in To Kill a Mockingbird can still be valuable today.
In Bryan Stevenson’s essay, “Close To Death: Reflections on Race and Capital Punishment In America” he claims that there is a tremendous racial problem in our criminal justice system. Stevenson explains,
Bryan Stevenson mentions the Walter case to support what he says about the justice system. Walter McMillian is a black male, who was wrongly accused of killing a girl. The police had no evidence of Walter killing the girl. They were
Bryan Stevenson has the same focus in the nonfiction memoir Just Mercy. He uses the pages of his memoir to tell the story of an innocent black man, in Monroeville Alabama who is falsely convicted of killing an 18-year-old, white, female, college student. In this story the year is 1980, but the racial divide still runs deep.
Welch, Kelly. 2007. “Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling.” Journal of Contemporary Justice 23(3): 276-288 also talks about the discrimination within the courtroom, in the court it has been shown that the prosecutors when fighting a case against the defendant who’s client is Black use their race as an argument to win the case. They try to show how Black people are prone to be violent due to racial factors and therefore should be sentenced harshly. Given the history, unfortunately this argument sets in well and therefore leads to sentencing and prison time for the Black
In the graphic novel Race to Incarcerate the mass incarceration of black men is refereed to as a new form of slavery. The system is set up to drag minority men into imprisonment. Once blacks are arrested they are more likely than white counterparts to be charged, convicted and serve harsher prison sentences. Sentences that go on their permanent record, that is if they are released. In numerous cases black defendants are unable to higher a lawyer, and given a Public defender, who tend to push plea deals onto clients. Plea deals can be pushed even if the person is truly innocent, as a way to end the case. And the very few cases that make it to trial with jury’s have a disproportionate number of all white jury’s and black defendants. Ultimately, these factors increase the likelihood of imprisonment for African Americans. But perhaps the most significant factor in the astonishing rates of blacks behind bars is the ongoing and longest war in American
In several cases and studies, there is a substantial amount of racial bias in the criminal justice system. In fact, the 1978 McClesky conviction has proven to support Baldus’s study in 1998. Warren McClesky, an African American male, was found guilty of killing a Georgia police officer. The legal team who represented McClesky exposed a study that showed how biased racial inequality is in the death penalty, but the court contended the argument because “disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system” (Touré). Furthermore, race has always been a serious matter in the Supreme Court and other government administrations, but they fail to recognize the
In modern-day America the issue of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is controversial because there is substantial evidence confirming both individual and systemic biases. While there is reason to believe that there are discriminatory elements at every step of the judicial process, this treatment will investigate and attempt to elucidate such elements in two of the most critical judicial junctures, criminal apprehension and prosecution.
To look closely at many of the mechanisms in American society is to observe the contradiction between constitutional equality and equality in practice. Several of these contradictions exist in the realm of racial equality. For example, Black s often get dealt an unfair hand in the criminal justice system. In The Real War on Crime, Steven Donziger explains,
Even though we are living in the 21st century, racism is one of the major factors affecting our communities; For example. in cases with no blacks in the jury pool, black defendants are convicted as 81% rate and white defendants at a 66% rate. On the other side, when the jury pool includes at least one black juror, conviction rates change as 71% for black defendants and 73% for white defendants. (Samuel R. Sommers, 2006). In the novel written by Harper Lee named To Kill a Mockingbird, it is realistic fictional stories about racism, and contains the story about Tom Robinson was unfairly defined guilty after the trial, despite his lawyer, Atticus presented a definite evidence in which Tom Robinson is innocent.
court system, and wrongful incarceration and extreme punishment are only adding onto this already out of hand problem. Much of this has to blame on how we treat people based on their current economic status. After years of work Stevenson concludes, “Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true commitment to justice.. fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich... The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned” (Stevenson 18). Nowadays, a very wealthy person who can afford a top-notch lawyer can get with away with never seeing inside walls of the prison while the poor who committed the same crime can end up living his entire life inside the prison walls.