Disparities in Judicial System

Disparities in Judicial System

Introduction

The paper discusses disparities in the judicial system of United States by outlining a comparative analysis of three articles. The paper provides a brief summary of the content of selected articles following a literature review of the reviewed material. Finally, the paper summarizes all three articles.

Discussion

Demography of the Legal Profession and Racial Disparities in Sentencing

The article claims that little attention has been paid to the ethnically and racially diverse pool of lawyers for justice administration despite dramatic changes in the legal profession's demographics. The article has investigated that how one facet of criminal law is affected by racial composition of local legal profession and results indicate that an increase in the number of black attorneys in the county has attenuated white-black racial disparity in sentencing (King, 2010).

Judging Judicial Discretion: Legal Factors and Racial Discrimination in Sentencing

The article has found racial disparity in sentencing and according to the findings, whites have 20% smaller sentence than Afro-Americans (Bushway & Piehl, 2001). The primary reason behind it is that judges act upon the common understanding, which can be linked with social issues. Judges are a part of society and norms of society affect their decisions. In the US, black people are expected to involve more in crimes as compared to white. These norms made the society stereotype and in turn affected the thinking behavior of judges. This makes judicial system biased on the basis of race. In the absence of justice focus, the verdict of the judges is likely to be affected by unconscious biases (Bushway & Piehl, 2001).

Racist biases in legal decisions are reduced by a justice focus

The basics requirement of justice focus is to ensure impartiality in judgmental decisions. The justice focus also tends to occur in people due to their professional background or personal expertise; however, ...