juries
Crowdfunded Court Reporting
Published November 20, 2009 @ 06:15AM PT
This week, a reporter from San Francisco public radio station KALW is spending her days in Oakland courtrooms, taking in all of the action (and inaction). She's reporting for a story funded by individuals through the website Spot.us, on the daily activity in a criminal court -- and she's blogging about what she sees, letting us in on both the process of reporting a story like this and the day-to-day workings of a court that the media usually misses in its 800-word story about a murder conviction.
So far, reporter Rina Palta has seen some high-level cases, more than one might expect from the daily grind of a criminal court. She wrote on Tuesday about watching arguments from both sides of a death penalty sentencing hearing. The proceedings piqued her curiosity about jury selection and she spent the next day watching lawyers interview potential jurors in a case where the state was seeking to label a man a sexually violent predator, making him eligible for lifetime civil commitment.
Together, Spot.us and KALW are exploring a new method of covering our criminal justice system, and there's great potential here. Criminal justice reform can't happen until the system's failures and successes become human stories to which we can connect. Crowd-funded reporting offers a chance to shine a spotlight on the invisible people within the system.
The CSI Effect, Fact or Fiction?
Published November 02, 2009 @ 06:39AM PT
The overwhelming popularity of crime and forensics TV shows like CSI, Law & Order and NCIS is having a profound impact on how our society views crime, but the storied effect of these shows on juries may be a myth.
A new study shows that watching these shows leads us to drastically overestimate the frequency of violent crime in our country.
The new research, from Purdue University, finds that frequent TV crime viewers estimated that the number of murders was 2-3 times higher than it is in reality. But true-crime junkies also think cops and lawyers are everywhere. They guessed that each group made up more than 16 percent of the American workforce. They're really less than one percent each.
So how does this altered perception of crime translate to the courtroom?
All-White Jury? No Problem
Published September 27, 2009 @ 12:59PM PT
An Arkansas appeals court this week ruled that Kenneth Riley's rights weren't violated when a prosecutor excluded a juror in part because she's black. This is just another example of our court system's inability to address the glaring racial and economic inequalities in trials, convictions and sentencing.
Riley, who is black, was convicted by an all-white jury (though not the attentive bunch above) of robbing an Arkansas convenience store in 2007 and sentenced to 80 years in prison as a repeat offender (there's that word again). One African-American woman was among the potential jurors randomly selected, and the prosecutor used one of his allotted peremptory challenges to strike her. When the defense challenged, he said it was because she was young, inattentive, didn't complete a juror questionnaire -- and because she was black.
