As Justice Creates Injustice

            In class we have defined justice in many different ways. Initially as a class we defined it by some high sense of urgency. With this sense of urgency as the foundation there would be a building of fairness that was comprised of impartiality to access to the judicial system that would result in proportional consequence to the action. As the class went on we looked at authors such as Plato who looked into the definition of justice at a much greater level. At one point of his exploration, the definition of justice was presented as the advantage of the stronger. In those cases ‘the stronger’ was seen as the head of some sort of governing body. Unfortunately we cannot all live in Plato’s republic, and in some cases ‘the stronger’ uses the American justice system to create large social injustices.

            The death penalty has seemed to find its way to an agenda of pressing topics of social injustice in the American justice system. One major failure in the realm of the death penalty is the large amount of minorities placed on death row. Less than ten years ago it was reported that in the jurisdiction of the US Military that eighty six percent of its death row was comprised of minorities. In the jurisdiction of the US Government the percent of death row that was comprised of minorities was seventy seven percent.

            If we have a justice system built on the fact that everyman has the right to be considered equal to the other and that they have the right to some sort of fair trial, why is it the fact that “while white victims account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80% of all Capital cases involve white victims.” The advantage of the stronger has played into a prejudice that has unfairly taken the lives of minorities that might have not been taken if they were white. To go along with the statistics on percentage of death rows comprised of minorities “as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.”

            When Plato explored the idea that justice is the advantage of the stronger he assumed that the advantage played into the needs of the people that the stronger was governing. Unfortunately in the, nowhere near utopian, American justice system this advantage has been used as a sick form of minority population control. Is it fair to assume that the gap between minorities and whites sentenced to death row experienced a fair trial where the consequences were proportional in the two sets of cases? Justice is based on a clear level of consistency in the law, and this is another instance on where the American justice system has failed to realize that even they can create some of the greatest injustices in the country.

http://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/race-and-death-penalty