# Here's your "all white jury", race hustlers **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [July 26, 2013, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621 "2013-07-26T20:09:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Stratocaster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stratocaster/32/16393_2.png) [@Stratocaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stratocaster)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/41 "2013-07-26T22:50:23Z")
I’ve noticed Steophan in all kinds of thread. Charming post of yours, though. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/42 "2013-07-26T22:57:52Z")
> [@Morgenstern](#): > > Everyone seems to forget that it’s the _defendant_ who gets the jury of his peers. Not the victim. The victim has zero constitutional rights. “Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.” – Syreeta McFadden ---
**Author:** ![Steophan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steophan/32/9595_2.png) [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/43 "2013-07-26T23:01:21Z")
> [@madmonk28](#): > > Looking at your posting history, the overwhelming number are about Zimmmerman, including your very first post. It’s like dead black kids give you a boner. Huh? I was a member here for well over a year before that happened, and have posted in hundreds of threads… The “find all posts” button only finds the most recent 500 posts, I’ve made almost 4,000 posts here. [Here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12736183&postcount=48)is the oldest post of mine I could quickly find. It is supporting a convicted murderer I thought was innocent, though, so you could say some things never change… ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/44 "2013-07-26T23:02:40Z")
> [@Kimmy\_Gibbler](#): > > His first link is to a still of Zimmerman juror’s interview with Robin Roberts on _GMA_. The juror, indeed, appears to be pretty conventionally a woman of color. (I’ve no idea how she identifies herself; I suppose it is possible that she does not so identify. But, if I had to make a guess as to how she identifies herself, I would not imagine, and would in fact be surprised to learn, that it is as a white person.) > > The subsequent links are to sources that identify the composition of the Zimmerman jury as “all-white,” which seems amply refuted by noting that this woman was one of those jurors. > > So, it does seem that there is some misinformation out there. For those commenters unable to attend to attend the trial, I don’t fault them for relying on a widely reported error (as, of course, **Terr** ’s post also proves). For the media outlets that did have on-site reporters covering the trial, and there were many of those, this does represent significantly poor journalism (if you were in the courtroom, this would not have been an easy mistake to make) and, correspondingly, somewhat undermined credibility. An outstanding summary, first of all. But your final paragraph is, I believe, remarkably generous. Given the huge attention to race over the course of the trial; given Zimmerman’s treatment at the hands of NBC via a deceptive edit; given the intense scrutiny devoted to every aspect of the trial – given all this, it’s insufficient, in my view, to relegate the failure to correct the initial reporting error as simply “poor journalism,” or even as “significantly poor journalism.” It boggles the mind to imagine the failure to correct the misapprehension as a lack of journalistic skill or understanding. It seems far more likely to conclude it was deliberate – that reporting the race of the juror as definitively other than white would disrupt the narrative the media had crafted thus far. See, e.g., the call about the suspicious seven-year-old black male that Zimmerman made as explained [here.](http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/25/how-not-to-correct-the-record-tnr-edition/) ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/45 "2013-07-26T23:12:16Z")
> [@madmonk28](#): > > It’s like dead black kids give you a boner. Are you claiming that’s unnatural? ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/46 "2013-07-26T23:24:38Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > It boggles the mind to imagine the failure to correct the misapprehension as a lack of journalistic skill or understanding. It seems far more likely to conclude it was deliberate – that reporting the race of the juror as definitively other than white would disrupt the narrative the media had crafted thus far. So you think that Brian Williams knew that the jury was not all-white, a fact which a single photograph would instantly and inarguably demonstrate, but he continue to report that it was all-white anyhow just to establish a narrative? That seems more likely to you than that some source reported it as all-white and then in the hub bub of everything that was going on no one realized that that was the only report that had gone out? Ie, the NBC people actually in the courtroom could look over and see that it was not all-white, and assumed that that had been reported, and the people outside the courtroom had reported it once as all-white and just hadn’t thought about it since and never bothered to double check? Or some such fairly mundane clusterfuck? ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/47 "2013-07-26T23:30:52Z")
> [@](#): > > So you think that Brian Williams knew that the jury was not all-white… Well, Williams _has_ appeared on the the _Daily Show_. Pretty much a dead giveaway, liberal media wise. And has he ever offered any support to Breitbart or NewsMax, or any of the other paragons of candor? He has not! ---
**Author:** ![camille](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/22d042/32.png) [@camille](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/camille)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2013, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/48 "2013-07-26T23:40:22Z")
I think it’s down to being clueless and/or lazy fact checking, because it would be just as compelling (if not more so), to posit the narrative about justice and the racial divide by pointing out that the one non-white juror was the lone hold out to convict. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/49 "2013-07-27T00:11:01Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > See, e.g., the call about the suspicious seven-year-old black male that Zimmerman made as explained [here.](http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/25/how-not-to-correct-the-record-tnr-edition/) Depending on how one reads that sentence, one might conclude that Zimmerman was intimately familiar with the black race… ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/50 "2013-07-27T00:26:21Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#): > > So you think that Brian Williams knew that the jury was not all-white, a fact which a single photograph would instantly and inarguably demonstrate, but he continue to report that it was all-white anyhow just to establish a narrative? It does sound crazy, doesn’t it? And it may well be that Brian Williams was simply never apprised of the truth. But here’s the thing: especially as regards NBC, there was already a fairly dramatic error in play. And what was NBC’s response to that error? Did they announce, on the air, the correction? Did they play the correct version on the air to attempt to erase the effect of their highly deceptive edit? Did they, on the air, apologize at all? No. They issued a press release in which they acknowledged that an “error” had been made. They never identified the specifics of that error. And then on the heels of that experience, you ask me to believe that: > [@](#): > > That seems more likely to you than that some source reported it as all-white and then in the hub bub of everything that was going on no one realized that that was the only report that had gone out? It’s possible. But it seems more likely to me that there was a concerted effort to keep the original narrative alive. And if it wasn’t deliberate, at the very least it was a corporate culture that permitted such a mistake to happen. I guarantee you that oversights in the opposite direction were not happening. Can you point to any errors at all made by NBC that favored Zimmerman? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/51 "2013-07-27T00:26:26Z")
So what we have here is a situation where a white jury found a hispanic man not guilty of killing a black man. But does the Florida court system get any credit for bringing these races together? ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/52 "2013-07-27T00:27:58Z")
> [@camille](#): > > I think it’s down to being clueless and/or lazy fact checking, because it would be just as compelling (if not more so), to posit the narrative about justice and the racial divide by pointing out that the one non-white juror was the lone hold out to convict. Sure. Except that no one knew that to be true until now. The racial composition of the jury was widely reported when the jury was selected and sworn; the fact that the one Hispanic juror was also the longest holdout for conviction wasn’t known until she came forward. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/53 "2013-07-27T00:41:41Z")
In the matter of the _Volokh_ excerpt: (Why did they give themselves a name that sounds like a Stan Lee supervillain?) If it was written that Z called the _police_ a given number of times, rather than _911_, would that make a difference? And did Z’s number of calls reveal an unusual eagerness to have contact with the authorities? Isn’t that the point? Most people I know haven’t called the police 46 times in their entire lives. And some of those are pretty long lives. His concern about the safety of the young boy is admirable, and ought not to have been mentioned. I would have been better pleased if he had taken some direct action himself, if he were concerned about the well-being of a child, rather than postponing such effect until the police arrive. To my mind, when a man straps on a lethal weapon he makes a statement, he says that he is solidly responsible, morally straight and worthy of a level of trust far beyond what is ordinarily offered to a citizen. I know very few people I accord that level of respect. _Very_ few. ---
**Author:** ![Steophan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steophan/32/9595_2.png) [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/54 "2013-07-27T00:46:59Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > To my mind, when a man straps on a lethal weapon he makes a statement, he says that he is so solidly responsible, morally straight and worthy of a level of trust far beyond what is ordinarily offered to a citizen. I know very few people I accord that level of respect. _Very_ few. And here, I think, lies the problem. Florida law, and (not coincidentally) the mindset of many people who live there, considers the carrying of a weapon to be a minor, everyday thing, with a licence that’s significantly easier to get than, say, a driving licence. Do you expect someone who takes control of a several ton machine capable of extremely fast speeds to be so solidly responsible, morally straight and worthy of a level of trust far beyond what is ordinarily offered to a citizen? If not, why make that distinction? Both are simply tools, that the relevant authorities licence the use of. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/55 "2013-07-27T00:51:26Z")
The purpose of an car is to transport people here and there, that is its design. The purpose of a gun is to punch holes in people. Malform follows malfunction. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/56 "2013-07-27T00:57:22Z")
I think in a case like this it’s a simple matter of being biased in favor of accepting something that “fits the narrative” more easily than something that doesn’t. We see it here all the time. Posters on the left or right will often accept a statement form folks on “their side” without scrutinizing it the way they would a remark from someone on the other team. **Bricker** , you were caught with at least one OP like that recently, IIRC. Something about unions workers and hurricane Sandy…? Not to single out you, because it’s a common occurrence. ---
**Author:** ![Steophan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steophan/32/9595_2.png) [@Steophan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steophan)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/57 "2013-07-27T01:10:21Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > The purpose of an car is to transport people here and there, that is its design. The purpose of a gun is to punch holes in people. Malform follows malfunction. That’s far from the only purpose of a gun, as you well know, and you _also_ well know that in some cases punching holes in people is both legally and morally right. Such as, when that person is beating you after having punched you to the ground. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/58 "2013-07-27T01:13:28Z")
You mean, would I kill a man for breaking my nose? No. How about you? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/59 "2013-07-27T01:24:48Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > You mean, would I kill a man for breaking my nose? No. How about you? What it the man was banging your head against the sidewalk? ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2013, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621/60 "2013-07-27T01:28:59Z")
Shit, if a man can simultaneously bang my head on the sidewalk twenty times while using both hands to cover my broken nose and mouth AND not get a drop of blood on his hands? I’d have better luck surrendering. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heres-your-all-white-jury-race-hustlers/664621.md?page=4)