Criminal
Jul. 17, 2013
What happened to a jury of our peers?
What happened to the requirement that juries represent a cross-section of the community, particularly in a case dripping with racial division, controversy and animus?
Aram B. James
Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project
335 Park St
Redwood City , CA 94061
Fax: (650) 424-9191
Aram is a former Santa Clara Count assistant public defender, police watchdog, social activist, and civil rights attorney. He is a member of the Coalition for Justice and Accountability and a co-founder of the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project, a grassroots legal advocacy organization located in San Jose.
Over the last several weeks I watched many hours of the George Zimmerman trial on television, and I paid close attention to many of the instant reactions by self-described "legal scholar" commentators on both sides of the issues raised by this trial.
Spoken and unspoken throughout the trial, the proceedings leading up to the trial, including the media coverage, was a palpable racial tension - going back to 2012 when the Sanford, Fla., police refused to arrest Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. And then we found that once the long-delayed trial began, the jury that was selected was made up almost exclusively of white folks. One thing that hit me viscerally, as the disbelief of the verdict set in, was my commitment to re-double my efforts to promote racial justice in a criminal injustice system that is broken - my long-held personal opinion, only magnified 100-fold as a result of the verdict and the racially tinged atmosphere that pervaded the criminal proceedings throughout. How is it that in 2013, in a country that claims to be post-racial - a simplistic notion that I have never given credence to, which was marketed by the media during the celebration after Obama's first election for president - that our criminal justice system can still allow for an all-white jury (OK, one nonwhite juror) in a case as racially charged from the start as this one? What happened to the requirement that juries represent a cross-section of the community, particularly in a case dripping with racial division, controversy and animus? How is that we let things in our criminal injustice system get so far afield that the state of Florida allows criminal cases to be tried in front of a jury of six - not 12 - people? This guts the concept of obtaining a truly diverse cross-section of the community. Martin's case is just the latest example of thousands of criminal cases tried in this country every year that involve black defendants and black victims of crime, where black jurors are still routinely shut out of the process - if not entirely, almost so. It is the time to insist that juries in this country that are judging black defendants or black victims of violence be judged by at least some, if not a majority, of black jurors. This is an idea triggered by a provocative proposal laid out by law professor and regular legal commentator Paul Butler in a 1995 Yale Law Journal article, "Racially Based Jury Nullification: Black Power in the Criminal Justice System." In Butler's piece, he quotes Malcolm X in words that seem most appropriate here when, yet again, justice has been denied - denied, yet again, along racial lines: "[T]he time that we're living in now ... is not an era where one who is oppressed is looking toward the oppressor to give him some system or form of logic or reason. What is logical to the oppressor isn't logical to the oppressed. And what is reason to the oppressor isn't reason to the oppressed. The black people in this country are beginning to realize that what sounds reasonable to those who exploit us doesn't sound reasonable to us. There just has to be a new system of reason and logic devised by us who are at the bottom, if we want to get some results in this struggle that is called: "the Negro revolution." Malcolm X, Speech at the Leveret House Forum of March 18, 1964, in "The speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard" 131, 133 (Archie Epps ed., 1968). Now is the time to open up an urgent discussion on race and our criminal justice system, as the life and integrity of our country now depends on it. Each of us is now responsible to make certain that no more Trayvon Martin's are allowed to be demonized and murdered, without a remedy, by a broken criminal justice system. Aram James is a retired Santa Clara County deputy public defender and a cofounder of the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project (ACJP), a grassroots legal advocacy organization located in San Jose.Submit your own column for publication to Diana Bosetti
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