If You’re Black And You Live In Texas…
You’d better not smoke any marijuana.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Awful 'n' Embarassing.
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November 8th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
Welcome to reality.
If this only happened in Texas we’d be lucky.
November 8th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
It’s a rather lengthy article, but after reading it, there were more factors than just the judge. It’s more like the two guys fell through different cracks in the system. It’s actually a suprisingly informative article, because it even goes into detail on the motivations of the lawyers (such as in one case not believing they’d win because of what the jury would think, or not contesting the probation because he was sure the guy would reoffend)
It does raise the point that it’s unclear what information judges have available to them (such as some but not all of the drug test failures) when making their decisions. Or how so much of the information is handled by word of mouth outside of court and so not recorded.
Just blaming the judge is too simplistic. This is one of the problems with an adversarial model, because if you don’t have anyone good enough fighting for you (the poor dude’s lawyer didn’t even remember the case), you just get steamrolled. Or just as bad, if they don’t think a jury will convict you (based on jury biases), they won’t attempt to prosecute. Or how deals are made just to get you to plead guilty (eliminating the whole trial), assuming you’ll do a crime again later to violate those conditions and end up in prison anyway.
Also, where in the article did you guys see race a factor? Socio-economic factors seem more a play (even with how they dealt with the murder victim). While I’m not ignorant enough to totally divorce ethnicity from social and economic power, it really seems like the latter was the biggest deciding factor (the poor kid’s family couldn’t even afford to get to the court to help him).
November 8th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Holy! You sure schooled me! I’ve edited my entry to reflect this.
Anyway - how is race NOT an issue? Sorry if you don’t see that, but it IS.
November 8th, 2006 at 11:07 pm
I said ethnicity was a factor in social and economic power. Race is a factor because of a hegemony that causes that inequality. It’s too simplistic to call the judge racist when there were so many described systemic factors influencing the outcome of these two cases.