White Justice, Black Defendants

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."