Acquittal rates
Yesterday while sitting in traffic, I heard someone on the radio mention that the acquittal rate in inner-city areas was around 50 percent.
Doing some pecking around the net, I came across the following article-
Written by Walter Olson back in 1996
Is It Really an In-Justice System?
For many, it’s an article of faith: The justice system is stacked against African-Americans. Last spring, a holdover Cuomo-era state panel made headlines by charging that black defendants get tougher sentences than similarly situated whites; the Pataki administration repudiated its report.
“Study after study verifies that color makes a difference at every stage of a criminal case”, according to law professor and O.J. defense lawyer Gerald Uelmen. “Whites do better at getting charges dropped or reduced to lesser offenses.” Do they? On Wednesday, the Center for Equal Opportunity will release figures suggesting that black defendants actually do better than whites at beating criminal charges. Moreover, although the numbers are sketchy, big-city juries may be acquitting blacks at a higher rate than whites.
The Washington-based center, best known for its president Linda Chavez, hired analyst Robert Lerner to assemble numbers from a U.S. Justice Dept. database of 56,000 felony cases filed in state courts in the nation’s 75 largest cities in May 1992. The cities account for most of the nation’s violent crime and an even bigger share of blacks’ encounters with the criminal justice system.
Black defendants, it turns out, were convicted at a higher rate than whites in only two of the fourteen federally designated felony categories. These two categories also happened to be the two smallest: felony traffic offenses and a miscellaneous category of crimes not against persons or property. In the other 12 categories, black defendants escaped conviction at a higher rate than whites.
Many of the differences were modest. Thus, 38 percent of blacks charged with robbery beat the rap compared with 35 percent of whites; burglary, 25 percent vs. 21 percent; assault, 49 percent vs. 43 percent; theft, 27 percent vs. 25 percent. Murder cases showed a mere one-point difference (24 percent of blacks not convicted, 23 percent of whites) with equally tiny disparities for public order offenses and miscellaneous property crimes.
Blacks did significantly better than whites at beating drug and weapons charges. On drug trafficking charges, 24 percent were not convicted versus 14 percent of whites; similar margins were seen for other drug offenses (32 percent vs. 23 percent) and weapons charges (32 percent vs. 22 percent). The other side’s obvious rejoinder is that blacks are being overcharged with these offenses in the first place. When DAs find the evidence won’t hold up, this side maintains, they have to drop the cases.
Admittedly, the center’s numbers can’t resolve this challenge, but they do cast doubt on the simple idea that prosecutors and judges are adding their own dose of bias against blacks. (Hispanic defendants, incidentally, fared roughly the same as whites overall.) And this still leaves the study’s most explosive finding: Whopping disparities in favor of black defendants accused of rape and other crimes against individuals that fall outside the dominant trio of categories — murder, robbery and assault. (more…)
And here is an excerpt of an article written back in 1997 by Paul Craig Roberts -
“Inner-city blacks understand that the defendant doesn’t always get a fair shake from prosecutors and police, who are under career pressures to produce high conviction and arrest rates. Inner-city blacks are not only street-smart but also justice system-smart. In contrast, middle class jurors are naive about the criminal-justice system and assume that police and prosecutors are purer than they are.
This means that black juries are doing a better job than white juries. The purpose of juries is to prevent innocents from being framed, not to fight crime by putting defendants away. Black juries will seldom convict on the basis of police evidence and prosecutorial argument alone. They require independent witnesses and a thoroughly investigated case. The fact that inner city juries are more likely to acquit explains, in my view, why charges against blacks are more likely to be dismissed. Prosecutors have learned that they have to present black juries with better evidence and, therefore, dismiss inner-city cases that they would be prepared to present to white juries.” (source)
I present these two articles because in Los Angeles, the Tennie Pierce case is coming up and there has been some talk on the radio that because it is a “downtown jury” that Pierce should have no problem getting the verdict he is looking for (In a nutshell–because I cannot find the post–Pierce is a LA firefighter that has accused his department of racism citing an incident where he was tricked into eating what he later found out was dog food. The only problem with his case was that there were several photographs of him playing similar pranks on other fellow firemen. One of the pictures show him doing something to a man who is draped with a sheet that says “Oy Vey, I’m gay”. The other pictures can be seen here. When wind of the case caught the airwaves, folks became angry and forced city officials to not go for the initial settlement. Now that it is about to go to trial, he could get more).
My beef with this particular case is that Pierce clearly played the race card as there is plenty proof that he is just as guilty pranking others in the same department while using offensive language. The LA city council immediately folded out of fear of being branded ‘racists’.
It is going to be interesting to see how this “downtown jury” decides this case and if allegiance to race will be a factor.
