Texas Metro VOL 4 ISSUE 6
Teacher and Students Design Breast Cancer Awareness Tee-Shirt
www.texasmetronews.com
November 4, 2015
News
Rigged: Racial Bias in Jury Selection By Marc H. Morial President and CEO National Urban League
When Elizabeth Oyetunde, Sade Burkman’s Aunt died of breast cancer in 2014 the pain of her passing was almost too much for her to bear. Aunt Elizabeth, a nurse in El Paso, Texas had lived with the disease for eight years. She was 50 years old and left five children behind. Sade Burkman is a 7th and 8th Grade English teacher at Nova Academy Prichard. She took up her crusade to educate others about breast cancer a few years before her aunt died. She wanted to share risk factors, diagnosis and treatment options. In 2013, Ms. Burkman asked Nova Academy to join the public awareness campaign. She was granted permission to pass out pink ribbons in October during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The second year, she created a display that included pink paraphernalia associated with the disease. The 2015 Celebration Life Campaign is more personal. It marks the more than one year anniversary of Aunt Elizabeth’s death. So, she partnered with her students and together they used their artistic abilities to design a tee-shirt to memorialize all who have been impacted by the disease. “I told them I wanted a heart (love), wings (faith), and ribbons (hope). After three tries they got it right,” Ms. Burkman said. Statistics indicate that breast cancer is the second most common kind of cancer in women. Nearly one in eight women born in the U. S. today will get breast cancer at some point. If found and treated early, many women can survive breast cancer. Ms. Burkman said it is important for students to understand this disease because it has broad implications not just for the victims but for family members. Participating in the national observance of Breast Cancer Awareness Month helps heal the pain Ms. Burkman feels about losing her aunt. She said she is pleased with the support she receives at her school, especially from Nova’s CEO. “I am most grateful to Donna HoustonWoods, for her encouragement and support. I mentioned to her last year that I wanted to do something a little more and I left it at that. When school started she reminded me of my intentions. She supported the tee-shirt idea. Staff members wear them each Wednesday in October. She said in tears, “I’m happy.”
“Illegal and unconstitutional jury selection procedures cast doubt on the integrity of the hole judicial process. They create the appearance of bias in the decision of individual cases, and they increase the risk of actual bias as well.” – Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Peters v. Kiff (1972)
During the Reconstruction Era, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The act guaranteed all citizens, particularly African Americans, equal treatment and access to public accommodations, public transportation and protected their right to serve on juries. This week—140 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875—the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a Georgia death penalty case that serves as an intolerable reminder that people of color continue to
be unlawfully excluded from jury service because of their race. In 1987, Timothy Foster, an African American, was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury in the murder of an elderly white woman. Foster, who was 18 years old at the time of the crime, is seeking a new trial on the basis of racial discrimination by the prosecution, who he
claims deliberately singled out and purged all prospective Black jurors. Coincidentally, Foster’s death sentence came only a year after the Supreme Court had ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that excluding potential jurors based on race was unconstitutional and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The clear message of Batson v. Kentucky to not exclude jurors based on race failed to police the behavior of prosecutors in Timothy Foster’s case. And Foster’s case is a textbook example of racial discrimination that is often so hard to prove. In this rare instance of well-documented misconduct, prosecutors used a variety of methods to single out and remove potential Black jurors. After getting access to the prosecution’s jury selection notes in 2006, Foster’s lawyer found “an arsenal of smoking guns in this case,” including
prosecutors highlighting the names of potential Black jurors, circling the word “black” on questionnaires, and taking note of Black jurors as “B#1” or “B#2.” Despite the efforts of our federal government and the Supreme Court to address and eliminate racial discrimination in the jury selection process, the practice continues to run rampant, and unchecked, throughout our criminal justice system—a system where more than half of the people on death row are people of color. African Americans make up 42 percent of that number, while they make up only 12 percent of the United States population. Deliberately excluding people of color from juries only serves to undermine our confidence in the credibility of our nation’s criminal justice system. How can we believe justice is being served if the system is so blatantly rigged?
See RACIAL BIAS, page 8
NAACP files brief in support of University of Texas Admissions Standards Case BALTIMORE – The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its Texas State Conference this week filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting admissions standards at the University of Texas at Austin. In a brief filed Monday, lawyers for the NAACP asked the court to continue allowing a “holistic review” of student performance when determining entry for college applicants. “Race is merely a fraction of one factor that admissions officers may consider when looking at an applicant as a unique individual,” the brief states.
“UT’s constitutionally permissible holistic review process recognizes the simple truth that race is still relevant in American society, and that race may help shape and inform individual perspectives and experiences.” This is the second time the Court will hear arguments in the case filed by Texas resident Abigail Fisher, who was denied admission to the university in 2008 and challenged the decision in federal court, claiming that the university’s consideration of race in its admissions process violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The case was sent back to the Fifth Court
of Appeals, which upheld its previous ruling. In the brief, attorneys for the NAACP cite the long history of racial segregation in Texas, which creates a compelling interest for the university to seek racial and ethnic diversity in its student body. The brief also notes that Fisher failed to meet threshold academic qualifications and therefore was not injured by the university’s consideration of the race of any applicant who did meet those threshold standards. Oral arguments in Fisher vs. Texas are scheduled for December 9.