The racial disparities in America’s criminal justice system are no accidents, they are deep-rooted in history to suppress the Black American.
Cornell law professor Sheri Lynn Johnson in 1985 after reviewing a dozen mock-jury studies concluded that the “race of the defendant significantly and directly affects the determination of guilt.”
Professor Johnson uncovered after stimulating identical trials in the studies sometimes with white defendants and sometimes with African Americans white jurors were more likely to find a black defendant guilty than a white defendant, even though the mock trials were based on the same crime and the same evidence.
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Radley Balko in a Washington Post piece on 18 September 2018 titled: ‘There’s overwhelming evidence that the criminal-justice system is racist. Here’s the proof’ wrote when one considers that much of the criminal-justice system was built, honed and firmly established during the Jim Crow era — an era almost everyone, conservatives included, “will concede rife with racism — this is pretty intuitive.”
The modern criminal-justice system, he argued helped preserve racial order, keeping black people in their place and that for much of the early 20th century, in some parts of the country, that was its primary function—that it might retain some of those proclivities today shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Therefore, in this article, Face2face Africa looks at some of the white police who were left off the hook after shooting and killing African Americans.
