Imagine if You Were One of the Many Victims in this String of Sexual Assaults — and None of the Criminal Accountability Jury Looked Like You

© 2015 Peter Free

 

06 November 2015

 

 

Appearance can matter — when it represents a substantive justice issue

 

For example:

 

 

A jury has been selected in the trial against a former Oklahoma City police officer accused of sexual assault. Eight men and four women, all of whom are white, will serve on the jury for Daniel Holtzclaw.

 

All of Holtzclaw’s victims were Black, and there are of course Black people in Oklahoma City, but none were selected for the jury.

 

© 2015 Clutch, Daniel Holtzclaw’s Jury Consists of All White People, ClutchMagazineOnline (04 November 2015) (paragraph split)

 

Clutch Magazine put it too kindly. Consider these additions to the factual base:

 

 

The trial of Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma City police officer charged with 36 counts of rape, sexual battery, and forcible oral sodomy of 13 black women, began on Tuesday.

 

But there’s one glaring problem: there are no black women on the jury. In fact, there are no black people at all.

 

Holtzclaw worked for the city for three years. While on duty, he targeted poor black women with criminal records. According to Police Chief Bill Citty, Holtzclaw preyed on the victims by initiating traffic stops or approaching women for jaywalking.

 

“Traffic stops, some of the individuals were actually just walking,” the chief admitted in 2014.

 

“Walking in their neighborhood and they were stopped, you know, searched, threatened in some way with arrest or something to that extent. And as a result of that, actually coerced them into providing sexual favors to him.”

 

One of those women was 17-years-old when Holtzclaw raped her.

 

The anonymous teen had an outstanding warrant for trespassing, which the officer used as a reason to approach her in front of her mother’s house. Holtzclaw allegedly said that the girl was also concealing drugs, before he groped her breasts, pulled down her underwear, and raped her on her mother’s porch.

 

© 2015 Carimah Townes, An All-White, Mostly Male Jury To Decide Fate Of Cop Accused Of Assaulting 13 Black Women, ThinkProgress (04 November 2015)

 

 

What are Oklahoma City’s “racial” demographics?

 

According to the 2010 Census:

 

62.7 percent — White (including, apparently, 6 percent Hispanics)

15.1 percent — African-American

9.4 percent — Other

4.0 percent — Asian

3.5 percent — Native American

5.3 percent — (by subtraction), apparently being something else, presumably Hispanic-Latino

 

 

These demographics mean that

 

The OKC criminal justice system had a pool of very roughly 37.3 percent non-whites to pick a jury from.

 

Yet apparently no one of the panel comes from this group of possibly more “attuned” justice-dispensing choices.

 

 

The moral? — Institutionalized racism

 

No other explanation is as likely. Not with a pool of 37.3 percent non-whites to choose from.

 

This is the oppressive situation that black people face every day, under every circumstance, presumably forever more (given the centuries that this fury-inducing situation has already lasted).

 

It is immaterial whether the white jury finds the alleged scumbag cop guilty. The point is that the victims of crime should not have to wonder if and when justice will be graciously accorded by juries that look nothing at all like them. It is not only the defendant in these cases that deserves a fair shake.

 

It would be challenging to come up with a significantly more illustrative instance of the bitter legacy that slavery has left us.