NCJ Number
216935
Date Published
2005
Length
16 pages
Annotation
After examining the current posture of prosecutors and defense attorneys in race-related cases, this chapter analyzes the prosecution of cases that involve racially motivated violence, assesses defense practices in such cases, and proposes a reform perspective for prosecution and defense that enhances race relations.
Abstract
In race-related cases, both prosecutors and defense attorneys attempt to present and interpret evidence that will marshal various legal and social norms that provide support for their arguments and enable them to win the case. This chapter calls for reform in this staging of adversarial combat such that progress is not measured by prosecutorial conviction rates or defense acquittal rates, but rather by standards of promoting racial dignity and interracial community. Such an approach to cases that involve the prosecution and defense of a charge of racially motivated violence requires a perspective of mutual state, victim, defendant, and community accountability. Under such a reform perspective, the prosecution promotes the affirmation of racial dignity and quality by exposing the opposite, i.e., behaviors that violate such a community norm for the interaction of diverse races. At the same time, a reform perspective requires that the prosecutor not intensify the minority community's sense that this one case is representative of how the race represented by the defendant customarily acts toward the race represented by the victim. The prosecutor should craft his/her case to expose what can happen when racially diverse groups are gripped by disrespect and anger toward one another. Defense attorneys, on the other hand, often exploit the social conditioning of racial stereotypes to explain and defend a client's actions. This, in turn, releases defendants and others of their race from a moral responsibility to transform their conditioning of racial prejudice. 45 notes