"What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!" as stated by Victor Hugo author of Les Miserable. This seems to be the main argument against the death penalty. However the death penalty, a huge controversy on its own, is made even more complicated when we begin to discuss the ideas of race, racism, and other biases. Research shows us that more racial and culturally diverse juries, especially death qualified juries, can help to fight this problem. Education on the research of bias prosecution and the criminal justice system itself may also help combat the problem.
A diverse and representative jury should decrease the impact of prejudice United States Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’ Connor once observed “Conscious …show more content…
Minority jurors contribute their unique knowledge to the general discussion. Furthermore, when whites anticipates participating in a diverse jury, they tend to give more careful assessment of the evidence. Diverse juries engaged in longer deliberations, discussed a wider range of information, and were more accurate in their statements about the case. White jurors acted quite differently when they were members of all-white or diverse juries. Compared to whites in homogenous juries whites in diverse juries appeared to be more careful and systematic in their decision making, making fewer factual mistakes and raising more evidence and issues for discussion. (A Jury of Peers: Democratic …show more content…
Modern-era death penalty procedural reforms were designed to eradicate such racial factors. The Baldus study of Georgia’s new death penalty system showed some apparent success insofar that the race of the defendant was, by itself, not statistically significant factor. However, Baldus and his colleagues discovered a striking statistical pattern that involved the victim’s race. Prosecutors sought the death penalty for 70 percent of black defendants with white victims but only 15 percent of black defendants with black victims. A case with a white victim was over four times more likely to result in a death sentence than was a comparable black victim case. (Death is Different : Juries and Capital