Willful Judicial Blindness in the United States

Willful Judicial Blindness

In the context of justice on trials in the United States, civilrights.org publishes the following: discusses the judiciary’s failure to redress obvious injustices by curbing access to and restricting the use of data that reflect the disparate impact on minorities of law enforcement and prosecutorial practices. The chapter stresses that courts bear significant responsibility for the injustices suffered by minorities in our criminal system, despite this era of mandatory sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines in which judges have less authority to affect the outcome of criminal cases through the exercise of judicial discretion. In the face of the overwhelming racial disparities created by policing tactics, prosecutorial decision-making and unjust sentencing laws, courts have generally declined to examine or redress racial inequality in the criminal justice system, and have made it harder for litigants to expose such flaws.