A history of discrimination
Despite its rights rhetoric, the US has racial inequity entrenched in its criminal justice system
Nearly 60 years have elapsed since Martin Luther King Jr. made the iconic and one of the most powerful speeches in the history of civil liberties and human rights movements. “I have a dream …” is a touching speech, a powerful protest against racial discrimination, yet his grandchildren are still judged by the color of their skin, rather than by their character and contributions to society.
Aggravating the problem of racial discrimination, racial injustice seems to have irreversibly permeated through the bedrock of the US criminal justice system, tarnishing the nation’s human rights record. To be sure, racial injustice and racial inequity are two sides of the same coin.
And according to the Center for American Progress, the vast racial inequities that exist today are the result of inequitable policies hundreds of years in the making.
As a self-proclaimed champion of human rights, the Joe Biden administration claims to be committed to eradicating racism in the United States’ criminal justice system. But human rights groups, civil rights organizations, academics, journalists and other US entities have argued that the US justice system exhibits systemic racial biases that harm minority groups, particularly African Americans. And it remains the general perception that systemic racism has not been recognized as a serious violation of human rights by many southern states in the US.
Hypocrisy has cast a pall over the “city on the hill”. According to Article 5(a) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1966, state parties should guarantee the right of everyone to equal treatment before the tribunals and all other organs administering justice.
Contrary to the above principle, the US judiciary has failed to guarantee the right of the Black people to equal treatment before the law.
Some critics have highlighted the disproportionately high number of Black people on death row as evidence of the unequal racial application of the capital punishment. In particular, two capital punishment cases have drawn criticism from human rights groups and fueled anger among the Black community.
In McCleskey v Kemp 481 US 279 (1987), it was alleged that the process of handing down capital punishment was racially discriminatory, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Warren McClesky was charged with murdering a white police officer.
The other highly controversial case is the execution of Kevin Johnson in November last year. The execution of Johnson is an apt example of racial injustice because special prosecutor Edward Keenan had failed a motion to vacate Johnson’s conviction because race had been a decisive and unconstitutional factor throughout the prosecution.
According to Keenan, racist prosecution techniques influenced Johnson’s conviction leading to his execution. Johnson was charged with killing a white police officer, because he wanted to “take revenge on police officers”. His execution reminds us of a 2003 Amnesty International report, which stressed that those who killed white people were more likely to be executed than those who killed Black people.
Shortly after killing the victim in 2005, Johnson surrendered himself to the police. The long time gap between Johnson’s guilty plea and his execution in late 2022 sparked an outpouring of condolence for his family.
And in Soering v UK(1989) 11 EHRR 439, the European Court held that the United Kingdom could not extradite Jens Soering, a German national, to the US to face trial for a murder in Virginia, where conviction for a capital offense entails an average wait of between five and seven years before execution. This is a fair criticism of the US justice system.
Equally worrying is the fact that the US government does not mind sitting on the problem of the disproportionately high incarceration rate of Black people. Despite some reductions in the incarceration rate of African Americans in recent years, Black offenders remain vastly overrepresented in prisons. There are significant racial disparities within the US prison population with Black individuals making up 38.2 percent of the federal prison population in 2020 despite accounting for only 13.4 percent of the total population.
For fear of re-opening old racial wounds, some argue that the disparities are primarily the result of higher rates of criminal activities among Black people. But some human rights groups disagree, saying that widespread poverty among the Black community, police brutality targeting African American suspects and the availability of only a few noncustodial sentencing options have resulted in the high incarceration rate for the Black people.
As mentioned earlier, racial injustice and racial inequity are two sides of the same coin. Economic inequality, in particular, has adversely affected African Americans and some other minority groups. Some argue that affirmative action is far from comprehensive.
Despite Barack Obama being US president for eight years and in spite of incumbent President Joe Biden’s claim of safeguarding African Americans’ rights, the wealth gap between the African Americans and white people has remained unchanged. Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans have been disproportionately hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has also deepened racial injustice in healthcare, housing, employment, education and wealth accumulation.
While in power, Obama introduced some healthcare reforms to help the Black people and other disadvantaged groups access medical treatment. The harsh reality is that the US compares poorly to other developed countries on all measured health indexes, including life expectancy, unmanaged asthma and safe childbirth.
But previous US president Donald Trump did not like Obama’s healthcare reforms, and played upon racial and ethnic prejudices, to cancel the reforms. His extraordinarily mild response to the death of George Floyd, who was “killed” by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020, gave the public an impression that Trump was just an onlooker to the reprehensible police brutality against Floyd.
All eyes are now on the Biden administration to see how it implements Executive Order 13985, which aims to advance racial equity and support disadvantaged communities through the federal government. Although Biden has tried to cultivate an image of a statesman who advocates racial equality, the deep-rooted problems of racial injustice and racial inequity have descended from an illness of the limbs into organic degeneration.
As former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd correctly pointed out, the unsustainable economic inequities across American society have fuelled a wave of popular extremism.
Finally, we take a quick look at Obama’s famous political speech in 2004 to illustrate that there is a huge gap between the impassioned narrative of a charismatic leader and the cold-blooded reality of racial injustice in the US. Obama said: “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America, there’s the United States of America … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
We beg to differ, for Americans are not one people. The US is a nation in gradual decay. And in spite of its illusionary goodwill in promoting human rights diplomacy, the US has a notorious record in entrenching racial injustice in its criminal justice system.