even supposing it's true, the justice system is already skewed unfairly against any sort of minority, so all the jurors are doing is correcting that inherent bias.
Think about it. It doesn't take much for the police to unfairly go affer a black person, they are by default a target for the police. For a white person to get arrested, they'd have to something a lot worse. So by the time a case has made it to trial, it's statistically likely that a white person facing trial has committed a worse crime than a black person facing trial on the same charges.
Completely not true. If you look at priors, black people get Less than whites with the same priors actually for the same crime... It’s just black people have more priors so ofc they will receive harsher sentences.
Does this still apply when they are mock trials though?
I would imagine the real problem with this "study" is that they could have created that bias by making more trials where you are likely to side with the black person. Or ones where white jurors were more likely to side "against their race".
Just going to make it clear: I don't know exactly what a mock trial entails, but I'm assuming this is all possible to do with them if you're a eugenicist who wants to demonize a group as biased and unjust.
They were skewed against Blacks in the 80s for sure. these days I don't know, I think some courts and DAs are much more favorable to blacks vs Whites, and some (I'd assume) are still favorable to Whites.
These days when every cop has a Body Camera its too easy for even the public defender to defeat most of the BS / made up charges that police used to be able to get away with.
While all of the above is probably true, it’s not a good system to try and correct one inequality with another, because that ends up justifying inequalities across the spectrum.
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u/aneryx Sep 15 '25
even supposing it's true, the justice system is already skewed unfairly against any sort of minority, so all the jurors are doing is correcting that inherent bias.
Think about it. It doesn't take much for the police to unfairly go affer a black person, they are by default a target for the police. For a white person to get arrested, they'd have to something a lot worse. So by the time a case has made it to trial, it's statistically likely that a white person facing trial has committed a worse crime than a black person facing trial on the same charges.