Will Race Taint The Jury Pool?
JUSTICE IS NEVER SO threatened as when it trips over prejudice. So juries are told to be bias-free. In a perfect society, they would do as they are told. But the real world suggests dismissed O.J. juror Jeanette Harris, is not so easily banished. And in that world, race matters.
Even before Simpsons trial began, racial polarization was evident. Whites and blacks started out roughly 40 percentage points apart in their estimation of his guilt. Succeeding months, and a parade of witnesses, experts and evidence, have not closed the gap.
It would be nice to believe that jurors could nonetheless rise to their assigned task and weigh evidence without prejudice toward either side. Indeed, the U.S. judicial system is rooted in the assumption that something almost magical happens in the jury room; that ordinary people, once charged with rendering justice, not only suspend judgment but also resist the polarization that defines so much of the outside world. jurors succeed often enough to give hope that even though justice may not necessarily be blind, neither is she a bigot.
That was not always the case. A few decades ago, recalls Harvard psychiatrist Alvin E Poussaint, "jury lists were totally biased; and we [blacks] couldn't get a conviction of a white person [for a crime against blacks]." Until 1986, lawyers routinely bounced prospective jurors purely on the basis of race. The U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to that practice by ruling that blacks and members of other "cognizable groups" (subsequently interpreted to include Hispanics, whites, women, Italian-Americans and the deaf) could not be pre-emptively purged.
But if the court could prevent blatant discrimination in jury selection, it could not stop jurors from making their own prejudices felt. Nor could it erase the memories among black Americans of decades of judicial injustice. Partly because of such memories, the Simpson case has assumed a particular significance among many African Americans. It has become, in short, a test of the quality of U.S. justice, and a reminder that, in the recent past, blacks were routinely denied due process. As Ramona Edefin, head of the National Urban Coalition, asks, "How many of our brothers have been railroaded by an unfair judicial system?"
Though Simpson is not considered a particularly important hero to African-Americans, many blacks believe his fate holds a key to that of others of his race. As writer Thulani Davis put it, "It endangers us for 0. J. Simpson to be demonized across the world." So most blacks are inclined to grant Simpson a huge presumption of innocence -and hope, as Hall of Fame halfback Walter Payton told Ebony magazine, that "there's an ugly monster out there" who committed a double murder.
Some observers wonder whether wishful thinking will render black jurors incapable of convicting Simpson. Los Angeles civilrights lawyer Leo Terrell, however, argues that such a conclusion is "ludicrous." He acknowledges that black and white jurors are likely to weigh evidence differently, not only because of differing feelings about Simpson but because of their divergent experiences. Whites, he suspects, are likely to find police testimony credible, while blacks may not. Police mistreatment of blacks, he suggests, has bred widespread skepticism among African Americans. "Blacks," says Terrell, "are not automatically going to believe what the officer says. "
That blacks and whites bring different attitudes to the case is not necessarily bad. The whole point of having a jury is to provide for diversity of experiences and viewpoints. Otherwise, as Georgetown University Law Center professor Girardeau Spann observes, the state might as well replace them with computers. Ideally, jurors are forced to confront their biases and the limits of their experiences and surmount them in the pursuit of justice.
But as Terrell admits, the ideal is a goal that is not always achieved. People often make up their minds without benefit of facts and shield their preconceptions in a cocoon of prejudice. Melanie Lomax, a black lawyer and former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, fears that the Simpson jury may already have succumbed. "It's clear that jurors are not following instructions and putting aside their biases," Lomax said. "Maybe a mistrial should be declared because it's become so disgracefully partisan."
Lomax's alarm may be premature. It's unclear what forces are motivating most of the Simpson jurors. They may yet be capable of serving as a model of how to reach consensus and get beyond racial tunnel vision. If Jeanette Harris's allegations serve no other function, they have reminded us not only of how fanciful it is to believe that jurors put the outside world behind them, but also how important it is that they try.
NEWSWEEK POLL
Do you believe race was an important factor in
the decision to prosecute O.J.?
WHITE NONWHITE
Important 24% 68%
Do you believe race has been an Important factor
In determining the jurors' views?
WHITE NONWHITE
Important 47% 60%
..MR.-
How many times could O.J. be tried? if the cases end in hung juries, there is technically no limit. But not even trial addicts can imagine more than three; by then the budget and the supply of potential jurors Would be exhausted ..MR0-
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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