Lady Justice has been the symbol of the legal system in America as standard which all that practice the law should follow. There is a flaw, in fact, there is a racial divide that separate’s those who practice law to those that are to uphold the law. Eleanor Roosevelt once stated “justice cannot be for one side, but must be for both sides”.( Roosevelt) This insight is not carried out by those who uphold the law or pass down judgments. The blacks in America, which make up a small portion of the population have become the target of a justice system that is not blind or equal, the scales of lady justice are not even and her blindfold has fallen off. The miss treatment of black people has always been a part of American culture since they were brought …show more content…
County School Board of New Kent County, the mission of the post-Brown cases were to eliminate race discrimination “root and branch.”10 So it was with the right-to-counsel cases,the most famous of which is Gideon, the Court sought to address its “concern over a criminal justice system where white judges and prosecutors processed poor, unrepresented blacks and Hispanics.”11
Racial demographics behind these statistics lend them a distinctly troubling complexion. In 2009,black males comprised less than thirteen percent of the U.S. population,21 but accounted for almost 40% of the male jail and prison population.22I African American men, with an incarceration rate of 4749 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents, were incarcerated at a rate more than six times higher than that of white men (708 inmates per 100,000).25
This trend extends to juvenile delinquency courts. For example, in2007, juvenile arrest statistics showed that while African American youth accounted for only seventeen percent of the general population, they comprised fifty-one percent of arrests for juvenile violent arrests and thirty two percent of arrests for juvenile property arrests.29 It is well-documented that “youth of color enter and stay in the system with much greater frequency than White youth” in nearly all juvenile justice