The Sixth Amendment does not guarantee a jury of your peers.
The Sixth.
You could argue that someone could not get an impartial jury but you still need to explain why you think the inmate you referenced did not commit the crime he was convicted of.
I firstly applaud runner pat for pointing out what the sixth actually says, since no one had challenged the “jury of one’s peers” proclamations at all in this thread (myself included.) However, court cases have found that the sixth mandates an impartial jury, and one aspect of an impartial jury (based upon court precedent) is that it be drawn from a cross section of society. So a jury in a state with a large black minority that did not permit or even voir dire any blacks would probably violate that aspect of the sixth amendment.
I don’t want to be difficult, but really if that page is accurate you’re looking at a 100 year old inmate. I find it odd I can’t find a single newspaper article mentioning him at all. With a centenarian inmate not appearing in a search at all I’m suspicious that maybe you’ve just stumbled upon some bad data in the GDC database–unless you personally know the inmate in question, of course.
I wondered about that, too. Though it’s likely that there’s not much from that long ago that is available online without a subscription. I did Google “100 year old inmate” and found a very few so it might be possible.
I don’t care if he did it. He did not get a fair trial because of his race.
Hill, jeff lee
gdc id: 0000362686
jenkins, johnny lee
gdc id: 0000363108
bellamy, william james
gdc id: 0000364106
beardon, sam
gdc id: 0000361988
anderson, henry
gdc id: 0000361870
fann, willie
gdc id: 0000362523
brown, herus
gdc id: 0000362432
cooper, leon
gdc id: 0000362027
All murder convictions.
All suspiciously old.
Hill YOB 1922- 88 YO
Jenkins YOB 1924- 86 YO
Bellamy YOB 1935- 75 YO
Beardon YOB 1912-98 YO
Anderson YOB 1914-96 YO
Fann YOB 1908- 102 YO
Brown YOB 1916-94 YO
Cooper YOB 1904=106 YO
Only Bellamy has a photo and physical description.
All the rest list no weight, height, eye or hair color.
I find it unlikely that so many can reach that age in that environment without publicity. Few reach those ages on the outside.
Something is odd here.
Just because you have black convicts from that time does not prove the trials were unfair. Any newspaper stories or court records?
Blacks were excluded from the juries, making the trials unfair.
Just because there were no blacks on the jury does not prove the trial was unfair.
Saying so means you’re saying that blacks will never vote to convict each other no matter what the evidence shows.
Which is another type of unfair trial, this time to society.
The Sixth requires an unbiased jury.
Your hypothetical jury with blacks would not be unbiased according to your logic.
Blacks were systematically excluded from juries. (The Supreme Court later held this is an unconstitutional denial of a fair trial, but the Court did not make its decision retroactive.) Blacks and whites were different legal classes of citizens under Jim Crow. For a jury to be an accurate representation of the community, the jury must have had at least the possibility of including member from the black legal class. People from the black legal class, which was systematically abused by the legal system, would be the only people that could accurately understand the legal system’s abuses of blacks and that the legal system thought nothing of treating blacks as less than full human beings.
The end result of Batson vs. Kentucky, while disallowing race as a reason for jury selection challenges, did result in Batson pleading guilty rather than risk a retrial and continued to get in trouble with the law and is on probation until 2026.
So while you claim the jury was biased, it appears he was guilty of the charges in the original trial.
You still have not proven that all trials were biased and a significant number of inmates were actually innocent.
According to Wiki, this guy is the world’s longest serving prisoner:
As stated elsewhere, this guy is not still in prison, but let’s assume he was.
Your statement does not mean that his innocence is in question. Were all-white juries unfair? Absolutely. But unless you’ve got step #4 in my question above, then I’m not willing to invest the state’s money to compensate this guy, or anyone else.
What if 60 black witnesses, including ministers, nuns, monks, and the leaders of the community testified in front of the all white jury that they saw him kill someone? What if he confessed on the witness stand? Should he still get $50 billion?
The OP said 1963, which was my anchor date. NY allowed slavery at one time, but that hardly makes them guilty of discrimination in the same way a state with Jim Crow laws in the 1960s is.
Now this is ridiculous. The argument is that an all white jury during a racist time period could not be counted upon not to use racism in part of their convictions. Throw in one black person who can threaten a hung jury if there’s any racism, and you help correct that balance.
The bigger problem with retrials is that it’s been too long, and almost invariably murderers are going to go free. There just won’t be enough evidence that has survived to reach the status of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
There’s a reason why appeals tend to happen right after trials.
Jim Crow laws as I understand the term refers to laws which segregated blacks from whites, and which discriminated against whites in various ways. These laws existed throughout the North after the Civil War. When they ended and to what degree they existed of course varies from place to place.
My only issue is what I feel was a very blanket “since there weren’t Jim Crow laws in the North” statement, I didn’t feel that, given its position in the post in question it was properly indicated that you were only talking about a specific place or a specific time.
In some states in the North Jim Crow continued up until not too long before it started to go out in the South, in many Northern states it had long since been eradicated. (Segregated schools in New York were shut down once and for all by Theodore Roosevelt when he was governor, well over 100 years ago–and even then I believe it only impacted two schools that were in operation.)
In the modern criminal justice system a very high percentage of cases end with plea agreements (the number I’ve seen is 90%.) If that was the case in places that only allowed white juries, but the defendant plead out before a jury was ever selected, can we really argue from a legal perspective the defendant was denied an impartial jury? I know we can make the argument that perhaps part of the reason a black defendant in 1930s Louisiana may have plead out is because he knew the jury would be all white and unlikely to acquit him, but that’s speculation. If the fact of the matter is no jury was selected and if no jury made a decision at trial it would be hard for me to say “well we should compensate this person for being denied an impartial jury.” The impartiality of a jury is only relevant if the jury was actually selected, and perhaps only if the jury actually rendered a verdict.
No, the reverse. What about about the all-white jury acquittals in the killings of Ed Johnson, Medgar Evers, Rodney King? What about the Jena Six? How do you handwave that away? How do you possibly rationalize these outcomes without coming to the conclusion that the all-white juries impede justice?
- Honesty
Rodney King was killed?
The jury that acquitted the police officers in the Rodney King case was mostly white, not all white.
On the flip side, the jury that acquitted O.J. had something like nine blacks on it.
I’d argue that a 9/12 jury of blacks is not a representative cross section of society in most jurisdictions, whereas a mostly white jury would be. (Whites are almost 80% of the U.S. population, so in most jurisdictions I’d expect a jury would be mostly white–de facto prohibitions against specific minorities serving on a jury is obviously racist and terrible, but we shouldn’t expect juries to not reflect the majority status of the majority “race” in America.)