White Justice, Black Defendants

By Janice C. Simpson/New York

The verdict confirmed the worst suspicions of many of the 200 blacks who live in the East Texas town of Hemphill. Last month a jury in that tiny village (pop. 1,350) found three white police officers not guilty of violating the civil rights of Loyal Garner, a black truck driver who had been arrested for drunken driving and died after an alleged jailhouse beating. Lamented Will Smith, a local black minister: "It seems as if there's justice for whites only in this society."

From the beginning, many townspeople doubted that the Garner family could get a fair hearing in Hemphill. Their concern was validated when Dorie Lee Hudson Handy, a 45-year-old cleaning woman and the lone black on the jury, confessed to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that she believed the lawmen were guilty but voted for their acquittal because "I was just one black against all those ((white)) people."

Cries of whites-only justice echo as well in New York City. "No justice! No peace!" bellows the Rev. Al Sharpton at innumerable demonstrations on behalf of Tawana Brawley, the black teenager from Wappingers Falls, N.Y., who says she was abducted and raped by six white men. For more than eight months, Sharpton and Activist Attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox Jr. have waged guerrilla warfare against the state officials looking into the case and effectively prevented any significant investigation of the charges. The trio's wild claims and controversial tactics have alienated many blacks as well as whites, but their allegation that the girl was treated unfairly -- and verdicts like the one in Hemphill -- have stirred up new concern about an old question: Is the criminal-justice system biased against blacks?

Many blacks are apparently convinced that it is. When the New York Times and WCBS-TV News conducted a poll on attitudes toward the justice system last January, only 28% of the blacks questioned felt that the courts are evenhanded toward white and black defendants. Such sentiments may reflect, in part, black discontent with the handling of several recent racially charged events in New York City, including the Howard Beach and Bernhard Goetz cases. These impressions also point to a deep-rooted distrust of the system, engendered by years of legally sanctioned injustice against blacks and other minorities.

Significant gains have been made since the days when blacks in the South were allowed to sit on only one side of the courtroom. In 1986, for example, the Supreme Court made it more difficult for prosecutors to use peremptory challenges to keep blacks off juries. A few months later, an all-white jury in Alabama awarded $7 million to a black mother who sued the United Klans of America over the lynching death of her son, a far cry from the days when an all-white Mississippi panel freed two white men in the infamous 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

Nevertheless, the perception lingers that justice remains far from color- blind. "There is a view in this country that if you're poor and black or Hispanic or Native American, you won't get a fair deal," says James B. Eaglin, chairman of the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice. "And the basic contentions that there are biases at every level of the system are well founded."

Awards for black victims in civil suits are a third or sometimes even half the amount of those given to white plaintiffs. A 1985 Rand Corp. study of 9,000 civil cases in Cook County, Ill., from 1959 to 1979 found that the median award to a white in a wrongful-death auto accident was $79,000; for a black it was $58,000. Other studies show that sentences for black criminals tend to be longer than those handed down to whites convicted of similar crimes. While blacks make up only 12% of the general population, they account for nearly half of all prison inmates and about 40% of those on death row.

Defenders of the existing system say sentencing decisions are based on objective measures such as prior arrests, employment history and stability of family background, factors that are commonly believed to predict whether a culprit will err again. But critics argue that these standards stack the deck against a member of a minority group; they are likened to the literacy tests once used to prevent Southern blacks from voting. "Some of the criteria that sound neutral and non-racially discriminatory are in effect proxies for race," says Criminologist Marvin Wolfgang.

In a landmark 1972 study that tracked 10,000 Philadelphia boys, Wolfgang discovered that 77% of white juveniles were let go after an arrest with just a warning, vs. 56% of nonwhites. In a follow-up study published in 1985, Wolfgang found that 49% of the white youngsters were let off, vs. 40% of the nonwhites, an improvement he attributes to the increasing number of black police officers.

More black faces on the bench, or even at the stenographer's table, might prove to be just as helpful. "When a black person walks into a court and sees a white judge, white prosecutors, white clerks, white stenographers, do you think they're going to believe they're going to get justice?" asks Franklin Williams, chairman of the New York State Judicial Commission on Minorities. Black attorneys frequently complain that they are not accorded the same respect that their white colleagues receive. Archibald Murray, executive director of the Legal Aid Society in New York City, says black members of his staff have been stopped and searched because court officers assumed that a black entering the courtroom must be a defendant.

Only 500 or so blacks sit among the nearly 13,000 judges currently on the / bench nationwide. Many are found in states where judges are elected rather than appointed. "I never would have been a judge if I sat around waiting for someone to appoint me. I went out and got myself elected," says Justice Kenneth N. Browne, who was first elected to the New York Supreme Court in 1973 and is an outspoken advocate of the need for more black judges. "No judge is infallible. They all bring to their jobs their predilections and their experiences," says Browne. "There can be no progress in the criminal-justice system without the contribution of men of color."

Several states, including Washington, Michigan and New York, have already convened special commissions to consider ways to balance inequities in their systems by, among other things, hiring more blacks at all levels and holding seminars and other training programs to help sensitize white court officers to minority cultures. Programs have also begun to encourage victim-assistance workers to reach out to blacks and Hispanics, assuring them that they too are entitled to their day in court. It is only through such measures that minorities may begin to believe in equal justice for all.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Cynthia Davis

SOURCE: Bureau of Justice Statistics

CAPTION: JAIL TIME IN BLACK AND WHITE

DESCRIPTION: Average sentences for blacks and for whites convicted of murder, rape, kidnaping, robbery, arson, drug trafficking and drug possession, as well as for all crimes; color illustration of black person and white person on scales.