Blind Justice

Scott Hardie | April 18, 2012
Hypothetical scenario: A jury weighs evidence and listens to attorney arguments during a homicide trial. But they never see a photo of the victim or the victim's family. And they never see the defendant, who observes the trial from behind a tinted window. Both the victim and defendant go unnamed, and details about their personal lives that aren't relevant to the trial are omitted.

Question #1: Would this eliminate, or at least reduce, unconscious racial bias among members of the jury?

Question #2: Would it be more fair or less fair to conduct trials this way?

This occurred to me while discussing the George Zimmerman case with friends. One argued that adding race to the consideration of Zimmerman's motives in shooting Trayvon Martin makes him look worse, as if he was only suspicious of Martin because of his skin color. But another argued that removing race entirely from consideration made Zimmerman look worse, because he appears to be an unhinged individual determined to seek out violent confrontation, unexcused by simple racism.

Nobody knows for sure what went on in Zimmerman's head except him, but juries tend to convict black defendants much more frequently than white defendants for similar crimes. If race really is irrelevant to a crime, then would it serve justice to remove it from any possible consideration by the jury?

Samir Mehta | April 18, 2012
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Scott Hardie | April 19, 2012
Agreed. There are so many other people involved, like prosecutors deciding whether or not to bring it to trial, and judges making decisions that affect the outcome, that it would be impossible to achieve for real. But I'm still intrigued by the possibilities in the hypothetical scenario in which it did happen.

I was going to point out that prosecutors like to describe the character of the victim, and defense attorneys do the same for their client, so the names and faces are important to both sides. But isn't that a facet of the same problem, playing on jurors' emotions because one life story is sadder than another? Shouldn't the case boil down to hard evidence like "man A shot man B from this angle with these bullets according to forensics" and "that's impossible because man A is too short to have reached that angle" and so on? Are emotional arguments in court the fallback option, the equivalent of bullshitting your way through an essay in English class and still passing when you don't have a substantive answer to write?

I've barely even been in traffic court, and I'm pretty tired right now, so forgive me if I've left planet Earth with any of this. :-)

Samir Mehta | April 19, 2012
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