July 15 (Bloomberg) -- A number of years ago, I served on a
criminal jury. The defendant, who was African-American, was
charged with assaulting a police officer, who was white. As I
recall, all of the prosecution witnesses were police officers,
and all were white. All of the defense witnesses were African-American, and they corroborated the defendant’s story, which was
that no assault had occurred.
The jury consisted mostly of African-Americans. If you
asked us whether we believed the defendant had assaulted the
officer, I am fairly confident that a strong majority (and
perhaps all of us) would have said yes. Although all of the
witnesses seemed quite credible, the officers were a bit more
so. Moreover, the defense witnesses included the defendant’s
friends and family, who could be expected to have a bias in his
favor.
