White Justice, Black Defendants

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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."