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Racial discrimination in the US justice system
Racial discrimination in the US justice system
The role of the criminal justice system
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On September 2, 2014, after three decades of waiting for their death row, Henry Lee McCollum, 50, and his half-brother, Leon Brown, 46, were declared innocent and ordered released with $750,000 in compensation from the state (Brothers Henry McCollum). After thirty years of isolation, the brothers are both mentally and physically affected. McCollum and Brown, who are now middle-aged men, have no education, job, or family, have to reorganize their lives in which they could have done 30 years ago. The two brothers, who were only scared, mentally challenged teenagers, while under pressure, confessed to committing a capital murder. Moreover, the question, whether race played a role in the two brothers’ sentence remain unjustified.
The killings of unarmed black men have increased tremendously with different races to blame for. In January 2011, the life of Justin Patterson was snatched from him and his family by Mr. Neesmith, who only served in prison for one year. How do you think the community of Toombs County and Justin's family feel about him only serving one year in a detention center? Many people protested that the racial issues behind his travesty caused an upstir in the world, including the murder of Trayvon Martin that just recently happened in Florida during that time. However, Justin Patterson's murder did not make national news or even in the papers because most people thought he was just another dead man.
In his book, Blood Done Sign My Name, the author Timothy Tyson tells the story of the highly combustible racial atmosphere in the American South before, during, and after the Jim Crow era. Unlike Margaret Mitchell’s account of the glory and grandeur of the Antebellum South, Tyson exposes the reader to the horrific and brutal reality that the black race experienced on a daily basis. Tyson highlights the double standard that existed during this period in history, arguing that the hypocrisy of the “white” southern judicial system allowed the murder of a young black African-American male at the hands of white racists to go unpunished (Tyson 2004, 244). The hypocrisy and double standard that allowed whites to bring harm to blacks without fear of any repercussions had existed for years before the murder Tyson wrote about occurred in May of 1970 (Tyson 2004, 1).
Bryan Stevenson first got into death penalty cases to gain experience for school. The kids at Harvard advanced degrees and obtained great amount of experience. Therefore, Bryan felt pressure to catch up, but he wanted to “something with the poor, America’s history of racial inequality, and the struggle to be equitable and
Capital punishment and bias in sentencing is among many issue minorities faced for many years in the better part of the nineteen hundreds. Now it continues to spill into the twenty first century due to the erroneous issues our criminal justice system has caused many people to suffer. In the book Just Mercy authored by Bryan Stevenson, Stevenson explains many cases of injustice. Stevenson goes into details of numerous cases of wrongfully accused people, thirteen and fourteen year olds being sentenced to death and sentences of life without parole for children. These issues Stevenson raises bring to question whether the death penalty is as viable as it should be. It brings to light the many issues our criminal justice system has today. There
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,
Humanity instructs us that we must behave with tolerance and respect towards all. Just Mercy exemplifies how that is not the case for many Americans. Critical Race Theory is a theory which focuses on the experiences of people who are minorities. It argues that people who are minorities in the United States are oppressed and, because of the state of being oppressed, creates fundamental disadvantages (Lecture 4.7). A study conducted for the case McCleskey v. Kemp revealed that when a black defendant killed a white victim, it increased the likelihood the black defendant would receive the death penalty (Stevenson, 2014). Looking at this fact through the lens of a critical race theorist, it illustrates how unconscious racism is ignored by our legal system. The actuality that, statistically, people of color have a higher chance of getting sentenced to death than white people is a blatant example of inequality. In Chapter 8, Stevenson discusses the case of multiple juveniles who were incarcerated and sentenced to death in prison. These juveniles who were sent to adult prisons, where juveniles are five times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault, show an innate inequality towards minors (Stevenson, 2014). Ian Manuel, George Stinney, and Antonio Nunez were all only fourteen-years-old when they were condemned to die in prison. Although they did commit crimes, the purpose of the juvenile justice system is to rehabilitate young offenders. Trying juveniles in adult court represents a prejudice against age, which Stevenson sought to fight by working on appeals for Manuel and Nunez (Stevenson, 2014). His humanity shines through once again, as he combats the justice system to give the adolescents another chance at life, rather than having them die in prison. The way prisoners with mental and/or physical disabilities are treated while incarcerated is also extremely
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe”( Douglass). This famous quote epitomizes the philosophies of Frederick Douglass, in which he wanted everyone to be treated with dignity; if everyone was not treated with equality, no one person or property would be safe harm. His experience as a house slave, field slave and ship builder gave him the knowledge to develop into a persuasive speaker and abolitionist. In his narrative, he makes key arguments to white abolitionist and Christians on why slavery should be abolished. The key arguments that Frederick Douglass tries to vindicate are that slavery denies slaves of their identity, slavery is also detrimental for the slave owner, and slavery is ungodly.
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
Walter McMillian, a young African American man from Monroeville, Alabama was convicted and sentenced to death row after a vigorous murder of a white woman occurred in his town. Multiple witnesses testified against McMillian while the jury ignored many witnesses, who were also African American, who testified where Walter was during the time of the convicted crime. The judge of the trial overrode the verdict for life by the jury and instead sentenced Walter to death. In the novel, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption”, Bryan writes mainly about the case of McMillian along with several other wrongly convicted prisoners on death row.
This paper focuses in on one of those "junctures" - the death penalty. The racial disparities that Donziger finds in the prisons can also be found in death row. To be exact, African-Americans are 12% of the US population, but they make up 40% of the death row population.2 I, like Donziger, believe something more is at work; and in the tradition of Ture and Hamilton, I believe that this something works in covert ways. It would almost be better if we could place the blame on blatant racial discrimination. But the death penalty does not serve the explicit purpose of oppressing Blacks. Racism persists, but it has taken on more implicit, more subtle, and arguably more harmful forms. The death penalty is a timely lens through which to observe the covert racism that operates in institutional settings. This topic can be overwhelming, and this paper is in no way comprehensive. Rather, it is an opportunity to string together some soci ological and legal concepts with personal analysis in the desire to demonstrate that the death penalty and the institutions surrounding...
Race plays a large factor in showing how you are viewed in society. Although there is no longer slavery and separate water fountains, we can still see areas of our daily life clearly affected by race. One of these areas is the criminal justice system and that is because the color of your skin can easily yet unfairly determine if you receive the death penalty. The controversial evidence showing that race is a large contributing factor in death penalty cases shows that there needs to be a change in the system and action taken against these biases. The issue is wide spread throughout the United States and can be proven with statistics. There is a higher probability that a black on white crime will result in a death penalty verdict than black on black or white on black. Race will ultimately define the final ruling of the sentence which is evident in the racial disparities of the death penalty. The amount of blacks on death row can easily be seen considering the majority of the prison population is black or blacks that committed the same crime as a white person but got a harsher sentence. The biases and prejudices that are in our society relating to race come to light when a jury is selected to determine a death sentence. So what is the relationship between race and the death penalty? This paper is set out to prove findings of different race related sentences and why blacks are sentenced to death more for a black on white crime. Looking at the racial divide we once had in early American history and statistics from sources and data regarding the number of blacks on death row/executed, we can expose the issues with this racial dilemma.
Question 1 - In season 3, episode 6, Hank follows Jesse to a junkyard where he finds the RV he has been desperately looking for. Hank attempts to pry the door open when Old Joe, the owner of the junkyard, asks Hank to see a warrant. Hank says that he has probable cause to search, meaning a warrant is not necessary. Old Joe makes the point that probable cause relates to vehicles and claims that an RV is not actually a vehicle. Hank points out the wheels and claims that it is a vehicle. With all of this said,
Mr. McCollum and his half-brother (Biesecker) “spent three decades in prison not knowing if they would ever be freed for being wrongfully convicted in 1983 for the rape and killing of a girl”; new DNA evidence shows they did not commit the crime. McCollum states, (Biesecker) “He watched 42 men sit on death row and make their last walk to the nearby death chamber to receive lethal injections, he believed many were innocent, if not for a series of lawsuits that had blocked any executions in the state of North Carolina since 2006, McCollum states he would have been put to death years ago”. (Biesecker) “McCollum expressed his belief that there are still other innocent men on the inside, he is the seventh death row inmate freed in North Carolina since 1976, the year the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court”. (Biesecker) “McCollum and his half-brother were never near the crime scene or had anything to do with it, but the man that did; lived less than a few miles down the road, and his DNA matched the DNA found on the cigarette butt near the victim”. If not for a new prosecutor and his acknowledgement of McCollum and Brown’s innocence the two would have been put to death for something they had nothing to do
For instance, the 1972 Furman V. Georgia case abolished the death penalty for four years on the grounds that capital punishment was extensive with racial inequalities (Latzer 21). Over twenty five years later, those inequalities are higher than ever. The statistics says that African Americans are twelve percent of the U.S. population, but are 43 percent of the prisoners on death row. Although blacks make up 50 percent of all murder victims, 83 percent of the victims in death penalty cases are white. Since 1976 only ten executions involved a white defendant who had killed a bl...
The natural state of human is not war. It is crucial to understand that the environment is the one that triggers the murderous state in humans. As years passed by and society progressed, the act of murder and violence has significantly decreased. The article argues that a combination of the mind and evolution tend to have a profound effect on how violence is impacted in society. Similarly, Candide relates to the point of the argument because of how inevitable and easy violence and murder forms in the novel. There were many instances where a large attack by burglars and mobs that simply wanted to cause misery to Candide and Cunegonde. The article correlates the way the capacity of murder tends to thrive in a man to the instances of mass murder committed in Candide.