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The United States Criminal Justice System In many ways, I believe the U. S. criminal justice system is extremely corrupt on every level. United States Criminal Justice System has so many flaws and fallacies that I could write an entire novel about it. The Federal Court, the State Courts, and all the Local Courts attempt to make every trial and arrest fair, but the truth is, it will never be fair the way that these courts come off to be. A trial can be seen in the eyes of every single person in that court room as fair, but there is always some type of bias among juries and judges no matter what somebody does or where they go.
In many arrests and ticket distributions, it is based on mostly race and gender, which I will touch on in my writing. According to Shannon Jones in her article on the World Socialist Website, “Its findings show that blacks, Hispanics and other minorities face unfair targeting by police and other law enforcement officials, racially biased charging and plea bargaining decisions by prosecutors and discriminatory sentencing by judges. ” This quotation was made in the year 2000, and is consistent with today’s justice system, if not much worse.
A town that has experienced this type of bias firsthand is the town of East Haven Connecticut, in which many Latino individuals have experienced police brutality and harrassment since 2008, according to Nina Bernstein. She also quoted that the East Haven Justice Department warned the town on April 15 that on the preliminary review, it showed that thair police department was “a shambles, with no modern rules of conduct for officers, no check on their use of force, inadequate training, and no functioning citizen complaint system. As seen in East Haven, I believe that countless other cities are facing similar ordeals. Even in my own town, Edison, New Jersey, mostly men are ticketed when stopped, and women are usually hit-on by male officers, sometimes even harassed with words. I have witnessed the gender bias in my favor when I have been pulled over. The reason for being pulled over was because of my red car and it “looked like I was going faster than I actually was,” as claimed by the officer.
He took a look at my record, and could have easily fined me greatly and put points on my license, but he let me go with a warning because I was a woman. Many of my male friends have received tickets for very minor offenses like running through a yellow light, for example. Even racial bias has been seen in the courtrooms. A very prominent example of this would be the O. J. Simpson trial back in June 1994 where he was accused of 2 counts of murder of his wife and her friend.
The trial was held in Los Angeles, a city he is very well-known in and had many black jurors. It is said that in Andrew Taslitz article, O. J. and Black Judges, that “…the jurors knew of O. J. ‘s guilt but wanted to “send a message” to police to halt racist practices in enforcing the law. ” When I read this, I was very angered because all of the evidence was there for proper conviction, but racial issues tied into this trial so much that all of the evidence was set aside.
I would be very infuriated if I were the prosecution to witness the type of corruption that took place in that court room for 134 days. Works Cited Bernstein, Nina. Connecticut Town Grapples With Claims of Police Bias. The New York Times: A20. April 22 2010. Oct 19 2010. Print. Jones, Shannon. Study Finds Widespread Racial Bias in US Criminal Justice System. World Socialist Web Site. May 16 2000. Oct 19 2010. Web. Taslitz, Andrew E,. O. J. Trial and Black Judges. Race, Racism and the Law. Spring 1998. Oct 19 2010. Web.