The Color of The Law
But now we are starting to hear various racial pleas to ignore evidence and free black defendants either as a political protest against a system perceived as oppressive and racist, or as a way of reducing the high number of black males in the prison system. Paul Butler, a black criminal-law professor at George Washington University, takes a cool cost-benefit approach: In cases that don't involve violence, he thinks, black jurors should "presume in favor of nullification" because the community needs the help of accused offenders, even guilty ones, to rebuild itself.
Law professors who advocate freeing guilty people of their own race, but not others, are an excellent indicator of identity politics at work. As columnist George Will wrote last week, the "diversity" people have to accept some responsibility for "the politics of thinking that you are but a fragment of the racial or ethnic group to which you belong and you have few if any obligations beyond it." Obligations beyond the tribe indicate a concern with justice, which used to be of some interest to professors of law.
Because of the anguish of losing so many young men to the prison system, some blacks now seem willing to look past crimes and talk about a system that "criminalizes" its young. The argument buried in "criminalized"--if the defendant shot somebody, it's society's fault--is often made even sharper. A Boston Globe columnist wrote recently that "we are rounding up the people our economy does not need and consigning them to concentration camps."
At the law schools, something called "critical race theory" spreads the notion that law is nothing more than a politicized expression of white power and that blacks can never hope for justice from whites. Writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Heather Mac Donald says many law students now assume as a matter of course that the law has a color. She says the president of the Harvard Law Review told her: "You can't study criminal law and not have race come up a lot. The mere fact that so many defendants are black means that the law treats blacks differently."
Tribal politics and woolly thinking may be setting the stage for a nullification movement that could inflict some very serious damage, including the isolation of blacks from their natural allies. Don't we all want to rethink this?
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