Consider jurors without racial prejudice

In August, 2018, illegal alien Cristhian Behena-Rivera was charged for the murder of Iowa college student Molly Tibbetts. He has asked that his trial be moved from Poweshiek County, where the alleged crime occurred and where he lived, to a county with greater Hispanic population. 

According to recent reporting, the suspect's attorneys claim to have spoken with numerous Hispanic potential witnesses who feared testifying might bring retribution. 

"These individuals fear reprisals from locals who hold strong opinions concerning Latinos following [Rivera] being charged,' the attorneys wrote in a motion.

The defendant's lawyers asked that his nationality be considered when selecting a new county.

"Without a venue where a minority population is substantially represented, [Rivera] cannot be fairly tried and any jury pool chosen will have to be stricken," they asserted in their motion.

The attorneys also swiped at President Trump. They charged immigration comments he and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds made had contributed to "fanning the flames of prejudice and jeopardizing the fairness of these proceedings..."

But it is Behane-Rivera's counsel that is appealing to racial prejudice. The implications are that whites, as a group, cannot be trusted to make decisions based solely on facts; that we would render them as dictated by a supposedly inherent racism inclination; and that it is reasonable to assume we would react unlawfully and violently to courtroom participation we disliked. 

It is a false, insulting argument that an entire group is untrustworthy and inclined toward discrimination because of an immutable characteristic. 

To bolster their advocacy of racially arranged juries, some point to decades-old instances where related animosities were exercised against minority defendants by all-white juries.

But past injustices cannot fairly be thought evidential of current-day realities. It is that fundamentally faulty thinking that engenders contemporary voting rights legislation based illogically on dust-covered findings. 

Attitudes evolve over time. Jurors and regions today aren't bound to their predecessors' records. 

Examination of present-day evidence is required, not uncritical reliance on data produced 50 or 60 years ago. Justifications for judicial or legislative standards that might have been sound in their distant moments are not necessarily creditable, now.

The Constitution does require that defendants be reviewed by a jury of their peers. To my thinking, "peers" means fellow citizens, not exclusively those of like hue (or sex).

I once spoke with a young white woman whose black boyfriend had just successfully challenged a jury on the basis of racial non-representation. The women allowed that, yes, her boyfriend had committed the crime alleged. But, she said, triumphantly, he had avoided prosecution by challenging his jury's all-white composition.

I just stared back. I'm a white guy who's married to a black woman. As I said, the white woman with whom I spoke was also in an interracial relationship.

Our own situations disproved the nasty idea that all whites can reasonably be suspected to harbor bigotry. And no, we weren't exceptions to a rule. Exceptions don't prove rules, they defeat them.

It is rightly forbidden for a lawyer to strike potential jurors for reasons of race. But insisting that jurors must represent this or that racial group is just the other side of the same bad coin.

In fact, not considering jurors as individuals with particular backgrounds, experiences, ideas, and values is textbook racism. Show me a man who believes jurors can be assumed trustworthy or not owing to skin color, and I'll show you a racist.

Judging people's characters by their skin tones is both unfair to them and injurious to our society. We're supposed to be better than that. Some of us sincerely believe in ideals of equality and unity.

It is correct for defendants to insist that they be assumed innocent until proved guilty. Jurors also deserve that.