In an order issued today, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria said that the hand-written notes of prosecutors from a 31-year-old murder case “constitute strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the [Alameda County District Attorney’s] office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases.”
If you feel you have to exclude certain types of people because you think they might demonstrate too much empathy or compassion, then the system obviously needs more empathy and compassion.
When an individual prosecutor shits all over the Constitution’s guarantees of equality before the law, and they take efforts to conceal those actions, that is a knowingly bad act and an individual who deserves some accountability
When those actions stay covered up for over three decades because nobody in the system bothered to get a second plants at any of this, that’s a system that deserves some accountability
e; like, I personally am a big proponent of needing more empathy and compassion within our system, thought for the type of person who that argument doesn’t connect with, I think there’s a very strong “We fought a civil war and certified a constitutional amendment to deal with crap like this, don’t reopen this Pandora’s box” argument to be made