The enduring lesson of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
By Ana Swanson
February 19 at 2:43 PM
“A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up” ... Atticus Finch demonstrates for the jury that Tom could not have committed the crime. But the jury of 12 white men vote to convict Robinson, anyway ...
Research suggests that the same racial prejudices that led to Robinson's conviction are thriving, if in more subtle ways, in courtrooms today ...
... judicial benches and juries .. tend to be disproportionately white, male and older ... Research has long suggested that the selection process is biased against minorities, women, the young, the poor, and those with particularly high or low education levels ...
Though the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that attorneys need to be able to offer a race-neutral reason for barring a juror, in practice it’s been easy for attorneys to come up with a laundry list of reasons to exclude people, like not making sufficient eye contact, working in the same kind of industry as the defendant, or having a family member who has been accused of a similar crime, according to Benforado. Judges are not well-equipped to decide which of these reasons might actually be based on race, and which are not. As Benforado points out, people often use race-neutral terms to justify racist actions or beliefs outside of the courtroom as well ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/19/we-never-really-did-learn-the-lesson-of-harper-lees-to-kill-a-mockingbird/
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