Blog Post #3

   

     I am now about 180 pages into "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander and what a book it has been. Alexander has continued to use consistently strong evidence to back up her claims and the book is overflowing with information. For much of this section, Alexander focuses on the power of prosecutors and court rules. Alexander argues that prosecutors are the most powerful authorities in the entire legal system and they often abuse that power to support the systemic racial discrimination in America. This claim was surprising to me as I had never thought of prosecutors as a part of the systemic racism but after reading the section it has become clear that this statement is completely true. I think Alexander wrote this section for people like me who were unaware that even in the courtroom, racial discrimination is rampant.

    Alexander begins by talking about the power possessed by prosecutors in America and the regulations and rules (or lack thereof) that they follow. Surprisingly, prosecutors have a very small amount of regulations over them. Although there is an official set of standards made by the American Bar Association, prosecutors don't have to follow them or even consider them. Instead, prosecutors have almost unlimited power in the courtroom. Prosecutors can keep or dismiss cases as they please without any reason whatsoever. This means that even if there is a case with strong evidence and a clear decision, the case can be thrown away. Although Alexander doesn't talk about this, I would think that this would allow bribing judges to be incredibly easy and almost always work. Prosecutors also have the power to file new charges against a defendant without any evidence as long as there is any probable cause. This also seems like it could allow decisions to be unjust and discriminatory without any opposition. Prosecutors can also choose whether to send drug defendants to federal court where punishments are far more intense and can send juveniles to adult court and into an adult prison. All of these decisions can be made with virtually no review and Alexander explains that this lack of regulation has led to tons of racial discrimination in courts. 

    Another shocking power that prosecutors have is the ability to reject jury members based on any possible reason the judge can think of. As Alexander puts it, "any race-neutral the reason, no matter how silly, ridiculous, or superstitious, is enough to satisfy the prosecutor’s burden of showing that a pattern of striking a particular racial group is not, in fact, based on race."(p122) This that prosecutors can racially discriminate and reject black jurors with no backlash as the judge merely has to come up with a nonsense reason. One example of this comes on page 122 as a quote from a judge explaining why he rejected two black males from his jury, 

"I struck [juror] number twenty-two because of his long hair. He had long curly hair. He had the longest hair of anybody on the panel by far. He appeared not to be a good juror for that fact. . . . Also, he had a mustache and a goatee type beard. And juror number twenty-four also had a mustache and goatee type beard. . . . And I don’t like the way they looked, with the way the hair is cut, both of them. And the mustaches and the beards look suspicious to me."

    WHAT?? To say I was shocked to read this is an understatement. This passage appalled and angered me but most of all terrified me. The fact that this juror was able to rule out black men based on their hair is simply horrible and scary to see. Alexander talks about how prosecutors can use this process to create all-white jurys and continue to racially discriminate against African Americans in every way possible. 

The image above displays the results of a powerful study about the conviction rates when there is an all-white jury versus a jury with at least a single black person

    Alexander goes on to talk about how the legal system was created to cover up all of these flaws and make it almost impossible to get evidence to expose and oppose them. She brings up a court case that consisted of four black men being arrested and charged for possession of crack cocaine. Their public lawyers noticed that they had received many crack cases in the past three years and not a single defendant was white. The lawyers filed a motion to see the prosecutor's files to see if there was racial discrimination in his decisions. The jury determined that the motion was valid but the prosecutor appealed the motion and after long discussions, the motion was rejected. The reasoning behind it was, the defendants could not come up with enough evidence to prove that there was racial discrimination and therefore could not see the files. Wait... What? The defendant's motion had been rejected because he couldn't provide the evidence of discrimination, which was the exact evidence that he was trying to find in the prosecutor's files. This case addressed the catch 22 of proving discrimination in court. Prosecutors can reject motions to prove their discrimination because there is no proof of discrimination already. 

    This section of the book has been blood boiling to read. The ridiculous power given to prosecutors benefits nobody but the prosecutors themselves and is wielded as a weapon of racism in our legal system. After reading this section of the book I strongly believe that prosecutors should be under far more scrutiny and regulation. The immense power given to prosecutors is unnecessary and has no societal positives. Other processes such as the selection of the jury and gaining access to files of past cases need to be changed as well. It should not be that easy for a judge to pick an all-white jury for bogus reasons and receive no scrutiny and it should not be an impossible task to gain access to prosecutor's files, especially when examining for racial discrimination. It is clear that these processes have been set up to allow for legal discrimination at the will of the judge and the legal system. 

Works Cited

Hartsoe, Steve. "Study: All-White Jury Pools Convict Black Defendants 16 Percent More Often than             Whites." Duke Today, Duke College, 17 Apr. 2012, today.duke.edu/2012/04/jurystudy. Accessed 18         Mar. 2021.