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Jury Racial Injustice

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Jury Systems and Racial Injustice Juries are the way we make sure trials are fair, but when your jury is biased the result of the trial are often inequitable. Today we do our best to make sure trials have impartial jurors, but this was not always the case. In the 1930’s, and a lot of other decades too, the right for African Americans to have an unbiased jury was not fulfilled. This caused many African Americans to be sentenced to death when they otherwise would not have been. Over the years the death penalty has been used way more than it should, especially with African Americans. Not only were they treated unfairly in court but they were often killed by mobs of white men for ridiculous crimes. In the past juries were not unbiased. The sixth amendment gave little guidance, insisting only that the jury be “impartial.”(King 53) This gave people lots of leeway in choosing jurors. Up Until the Civil War all the federal courts followed the jury selection procedures of the state in which the court was located. All but one state limited the jury to white men who were property owners or taxpayers with intelligence or fair character. (King 54) Whether or not a potential juror had intelligence or fair character was all opinion and …show more content…

Strating around Colonial times an abolitionist movement started. In 1767 Cesare Beccaria wrote an essay called On crimes and punishment. This essay theorized that there was no justification for the state’s taking of a life. It had a major impact around the world, causing the abolition of the death penalty in Austria and Tuscany and the first attempted reforms in the U.S. by Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill to revise Virginia’s death penalty and proposed that capital punishment be used only for crimes of murder and treason.(“History of the Death

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