Black Conservative Feels Race Card Should Be Thrown Out of Court
by Chad Groening and Jenni Parker
June 17, 2005
(AgapePress) - A black conservative activist says he has a problem with two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that may make it easier for defendants to claim racial bias in jury selections.Recently, in an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court threw out a California murder conviction of a black man found guilty by an all-white jury. And in a Texas case, in a 6-3 vote, justices overturned the murder conviction of a death row inmate, saying the jury selection process had been infected by racial discrimination.
Mychal Massie is on the National Advisory Council of the conservative African-American group known as Project 21. He finds the two recent Supreme Court rulings problematic.
Massie says the implication behind the high court rulings is that "the only way a black person can get a fair trial is with a black person on the jury." However, he asks, "What happens if you have blacks on the jury, you have a black plaintiff, you have a black person standing accused, and they do not find [the defendant] innocent?"
What, Massie muses, would that suggest about the members of the jury? "Are they sellouts? Are they 'Uncle Toms'?" he wonders. "Or has the system worked?"
The Project 21 spokesman feels the recent Supreme Court rulings advance the notion that black defendants or other races can only receive a fair trial if they have members of their race on the jury. However, he says, "Following that logic, what do we make of Michael Jackson's jury?"
The arguments in the celebrity's case, Massie points out, included the assertion "that there was no way he could get a fair trial." Yet somehow, the black conservative points out, Jackson was acquitted by a jury not of his race but of his peers -- fellow citizens.
"To allow and encourage attorneys and inmates to play a race card is an affront to the system as it exists," Massie says. "And this, as I view it, is nothing more than taking us back to a period of time that we should put behind us."
Massie disagrees with the Supreme Court's two recent race-related rulings. He has a hard time seeing the court's logic in allowing attorneys to argue in court that race should not be at issue by making it the issue.
