The enduring lesson of Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
ByAna SwansonFebruary 19, 2016
Gregory Peck as attorney Atticus Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man accused of rape, in a scene from the 1962 movie "To Kill a Mockingbird." (AP Photo)
“A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up,” Atticus Finch, the lawyer in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” tells the jury in his closing arguments.Finch has just convincingly argued to acquit a black man, Tom Robinson, who was falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town. Atticus Finch demonstrates for the jury that Tom could not have committed the crime. But the jury of 12 white men vote to convict Robinson, anyway.
Harper Lee, the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird,"passed away at 89 today, leaving behind a massivelegacy. Her booksold more than 40 million copiessince it was published in 1960, and Americans rank it among the most influential books they've read. But after more than 50 years and millions of classrooms lessons, some of its central lessons still, at least at times, go unheard.
Research suggeststhat the sameracial prejudices that led to Robinson's conviction are thriving, if in more subtle ways, in courtrooms today. Numerous studies show thatblack defendantsare more likely to be convictedof crimes than white defendants, and thatpeople found guilty ofmurdering white victimsare significantly more likely to be sentenced to deaththan those who murder blacks.Inone study at Cornell, researchers found that defendants with more stereotypically black features – a broad nose, thick lips and darker skin – were more likely to receive a death sentence in crimes against a white victim.
These differential results have a lot to do with a lack of diversity on judicial benches and juries, which tend to be disproportionately white, male and older, as the jury in "To Kill a Mockingbird" was.Though racial discrimination in jury selection is illegal, it has a long history in the U.S.Research has long suggestedthat the selection process is biased against minorities, women, the young, the poor, and those with particularly high or low education levels.
An 1880decision by the Supreme Courtprohibitedjudges and lawyers from striking or selecting jurors solely because of their race – though it allowed exclusions for other factors, like age or education. However, the decisionalso decreedthat juries didn’t have to be racially diverse or representative of the broader population. Itrung in a long tradition in which attorneys excluded minorities from juries, but came up with other reasons for doing so beyond race.
When a jury is selected today, the judge will first strike jurors he or she deems incapable of being impartial. Then lawyers for both the prosecution and defense can ask that a certain number of jurors be removed, a practice called peremptory challenges.
As Adam Benforado describes in his book, “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice,” peremptory challengeswere meant to give lawyers the freedom to detect and eliminate subtle, preexisting biases against their clients that might influence the outcome of the case. Instead, the practice is oftenused to introduce more bias into the system.
A 2011 studythat looked at 173 death penalty cases in North Carolina found that peremptory challenges were used to remove blacks from juries at twice the rate of whites. InHouston County, Alabama, 80 percentof the African Americans qualified for jury service were removed from juries between 2005 and 2009 using peremptory strikes.
Though theSupreme Court ultimately ruledthat attorneys need to be able to offer a race-neutral reason for barring a juror, in practice it’s been easy for attorneys to come up with a laundry list of reasons to exclude people, like not making sufficient eye contact, working in the same kind of industry as the defendant, or having a family member who has been accused of a similar crime, according to Benforado. Judgesare not well-equipped to decide which of these reasons might actually be based on race, and which are not. As Benforado points out, people oftenuse race-neutral terms to justify racist actions or beliefs outside of the courtroom as well.
The result, Benforado argues, is that the justice system has yet to deal with the core problem of discrimination in the courtroom.
This same practice may haveat work in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As Scout, the little girl who is the book's main character, sits in the courtroom, watching her father argue in favor of Robinson, she describes the all-white jury. The 12 jurors were from out of town,“sunburned” and “lanky.” They all seemed to be farmers, Scout says in the book, “but this was natural: townsfolk rarely sat on juries, they were either struck or excused.