Blog Post #5 News Today

 Tom Robinson was sentenced to death by an all white jury after he was tried for assaulting a white woman. There were no witnesses except Mayella, who lied.  He maintained his innocence and his disabled arm proved he could not have committed the crime. Yet, he was convicted anyway.

In a news story reported last year, Glen Ford, a black man in Louisiana was freed after 30 years on death row.   An all white jury convicted Glen Ford of the murder of a white jewelry shop owner even though there were no witnesses to the crime.  He was suspected because he knew the shop owner and occasionally did yard work for him.  This case is very similar to TKAM. Both accusers where white, the accused person knew the accuser and both were convicted by all white juries.  Glen Ford was on death row longer than any other person in Louisiana.   This case was wrong because, just like in TKAM, there was a lying witness and an all white jury.  Just like Tom Robinson, he should have been found not guilty and should have had a real jury of his peers that included black people.

Duke University published a report in 2012 "Study:  All-White Jury Pools Convict Black Defendants Sixteen Percent More Often Than Whites" that said "in cases with no blacks in the jury pool, blacks were convicted 81 percent of the time and whites were convicted 66 percent of the time." TKAM was written in the 1960s, Ford was convicted in the 1980s and this report is from 2012, it seems like we still have a long way to go on race relations and how we view the justice system.  Maybe morality means something different when you sit in a jury box.

                                     All White Juries Convict Blacks 16 Percent More Often Than Whites