Essay Sample on Urban Criminal Justice System

Introduction

Total race neutrality refers to the equal treatment of all persons regardless of their race without discrimination. The conservatives accept the type of racial non-neutrality that keeps the welfare of the blacks at the forefront. They aim at advocating for the blacks without the acknowledgment of the liability of their actions towards the law while making allegations of racial discrimination. Racial disparities do not equal racial discrimination although conservatives continually insist so due to the observable racial disparities that exist. Racial disparities are often taken as evidence of racial discrimination due to the high numbers of the blacks that are recorded of have committed offenses according to the law. Statistics are powerful tools of uncovering racial misconduct, and people must understand that racial disparity does not come from decision making that is biased by the police but rather other causes.

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Politics of respectability refers to enabling blacks to meet moral standards of the white middle-class Americans that are free from invidious crippling racial discriminations. It insists that blacks ought to be treated with respect by distancing them from negative stereotypes against Negroes. It however faces limitations such as the undue fear of antagonizing whites, the desire of blacks to be seen as respectable such that they shun all that is associated with bad Negroes, the ignorance of the prevailing conditions of deprivation that makes people turn to criminal misconduct and the webs of commonality that connect criminals to law-abiding community members. Police brutality is exaggerated as the violence, and crime the black gangs demonstrate is wanting. The race card refers to blaming of exploitation by a racial power against the other. Both the whites and the blacks play it.

The American legal system evolution was influenced by the violence that was racially motivated as the law that governed violence against slaves led to laws governing their homicide and evolved over time to protection against nonfatal assaults. Chiefly, killing the slaves was the main crime against them as there was no law to protect them against such acts by their masters. The 14th Amendment of the constitution protected the blacks against concerted white terror. Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were activists who were killed while responding to the burning of a church by Klansmen. Jury nullification refers to the rebuttal to find guilty despite certainty beyond a rational uncertainty based on accurate verification that the defendant committed the transgression for which he is charged (Kennedy 65). It was used by white juries so as not to give the blacks equal law protection as that accorded to the whites. The government has failed to protect blacks from crimes done by other blacks as it perceives the crimes done by the blacks on whites to be of more magnitude and seriousness.

The Jim Crow era was a period when the laws and customs oppressed blacks. The case of Moore v. Dempsey protected against the state's criminal procedure by advancement of the federal constitutionalization and led to the development of federal habeas corpus relief. The Scottsboro boys were nine youngsters who were charged for raping two white women who were on board a freight train after ejecting white men from the car in which the two women were riding as hoboes (Kennedy 99). The Brown v. Mississippi case where three black farmhands were indicted for murdering a white farmer, tried, convicted and sentenced to death in two days (Kennedy 104). In this case, the intervention of the court saved the defendants from death. This led to the prohibition of Mississippi officials from the use of confessions that were obtained by the use of torture. Judges had declined to intervene in the prison governance despite the character of the allegations against the inmates, and they refused to hear complaints made by the inmates about the conditions on the ground. This however changed in the 1960s when a movement for prisoner's rights heightened awareness to the dangers of the unchecked governmental power and the vulnerabilities of the prisoners combined thus made it necessary for the federal judiciary to scrutinize and modify the conduct of jail and prison authorities.

The use of race as a proxy for risk is not legitimate as it is a concept that indicates the existence of differing conceptions of racial equality which use blackness as a trait for an increased risk of criminality. Using race as a proxy causes the blacks who might be of assistance to the police to avoid them, decline to cooperate with them during investigations, assume bad faith on the police officers part to teach others that such reactions are prudent lessons of survival on the streets (Kennedy 152). They do this as the relationship between them is strained by the racial distinction they face when the police are handling them. A racial tax refers to the markers that facilitate efficient law enforcement. The whites pay a racial tax for the purpose of opening up opportunities for people of color in education and employment while the blacks pay a racial tax for the purpose of more efficient law enforcement. Whites claim that they are victims of racial discrimination due to affirmative action policies while blacks claim they are victims of racial discrimination due to race-based police stops.

The selection of the jury using racial criteria to get racial inclusion as the reasons held are insufficiently strong to overcome what should be a vibrant, powerful, and vigorously protected presumption in the constitutional law of American race relations. This relation should be that in governmental affairs race can play no proper role in distinguishing between persons. Norris v. Alabama declared against racial discrimination and the fraud local officials perpetrated in order to cover the issue up. They are also celebrated as the decision revived the doctrine that the long-term absence of blacks from juries in jurisdictions constitutes a prima facie case of discrimination (Kennedy 176). The supreme court had within the twelve years of Norris reversed convictions in five cases in which the black defendants had been sentenced to death by juries which were all-white in counties where blacks had been absent as jurors.

A peremptory challenge empowers attorneys to exclude potential jurors without having initially to articulate the exclusion basis (Kennedy 193). The Supreme Court prohibits on all racially discriminatory peremptory challenges and urge judges to be more vigorous in their enforcement of the established antidiscrimination standard. Batson v. Kentucky is a case where James Kirkland Batson, a black defendant, was convicted of burglary and the receipt of stolen goods after an objection by the prosecutor who removed all four of the six blacks from the jury to an all-white jury which tried and convicted him (Kennedy 204). Swain is a book authored by Justice White that explains on peremptory. Batson has made much an effect on behavior as banning racially motivated peremptory challenges while permitting peremptory challenges generally would fail to address the problem satisfactorily. The author holds that more than racial prejudice has to be worried about by opponents of racially discriminatory peremptory challenge as they have to contend with the desire of attorneys to prevail, the desire of prosecutors to convict those who they believe are guilty and the defense council's desire to provide their clients with fervent representation.

The author's reluctance to use racial criteria to redress racial disadvantages stems from a judgment about the present and a hope for the future. The judgment is that race-dependent policies are so toxic that they are to be avoided in the absence of a clear showing that such policies are the only way to achieve a goal of compelling importance immediately. The hope is for a society in which color no longer serves as a uniform that places a person in one racial army or another that no longer delimits the possibilities open to individuals, and no longer constitutes an important social, moral, or political category. Blacks are under-represented in juries because they are they are underrepresented on voter registration lists which are most commonly used source for prospective jurors and the blacks do not return the questionnaires sent to all prospective jurors to be deemed eligible for jury service.

The plain error doctrine is a rule which holds that certain conduct that is blatantly and gravely injurious requires judicial intervention even in the absence of an objection by the defense counsel. Harmless error doctrine is a rule that stands for the proposition that violation of a defendants' rights is harmless if a reviewing court concludes that the defendant would have been convicted given the evidence even had the violation of the rights not occurred. The author holds that although courts should be more exacting and forceful in responding to prosecutorial racial appeals, adoption of an automatic reversal rule is a good idea. The author objects jury nullification by blacks as the nature of social injustice is not of the sort that properly gives rise to revolutionary subversion, the problem of efficacy remains, and the call for racially selective jury nullification is based on a sentiment that is widespread in American culture. Harsh punishment for crack is not racist as crack harms the people who use it, who are mostly the blacks. Over-emphasizing social causes of crime is harmful to blacks as it gives them a leeway to use the prevailing social conditions as an excuse to turn to crime.

Coker v. Georgia prohibited states from punishing rape with death. Forman V. Georgia nullified most existing state laws authorizing the death sentence on the grounds that they violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments (Kennedy 323). Greg v. Georgia said that sentences tend to be applied in a racially discriminatory fashion. McCleskey rejected having shot officer Schlatt who had been shot during a store heist he participated in. The author advocates for increasing the number of people executed for murdering blacks rather than abolishing capital punishment altogether. This view is hard to implement as the death penalty is distorted as limits the class of people eligible for execution.

Work Cited

Kennedy, Randall (2019). Race, Crime, and the Law.

Accessed 22 February 2019, from https://www.amazon.com/Race-Crime-Law-Randall-Kennedy/dp/0375701842