Word: acquitting
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...Juries acquit defendants whose culpability is so clear that their own lawyers later admit they were almost certain of a guilty verdict. A 100 percent track record may be unrealistic, but courts must do better to convict those who clearly commit unlawful acts. It is the current inequitable process of jury selection that is largely to blame...
...Alan M. Dershowitz, in his recently published Contrary to Popular Opinion, describes the American jury as the "conscience of the community." This "quixotic conscience," he says, sometimes reflects the best of what we stand for and other times the worst. Thus, in the '60s, all-white juries acquitted Klansmen who had murdered civil rights workers in the South and today, inner city juries acquit Black defendants charged with murdering law enforcement officials--a trend of minority distrust of police officers that was evident in the Kahane and Rosenbaum cases...
Such stereotypes, I submit, go a long way toward explaining how an all-white Simi Valley, Ca. jury could ignore what most believed to be incontrovertible evidence, and acquit white cops of the vicious beating of Rodney King...
...Professor Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of Southern California Law Center. "Was it reasonable or excessive force? If the jury finds that by community standards it was excessive force, it will convict. If the case can be made that it was reasonable force in that situation, then they will acquit...
...current case, which could be heard as early as October: the federal jury pool is drawn from the entire metropolitan area, and will probably include some black and Hispanic members with a different perspective on the trustworthiness of the police. Also, the jury may feel pressure not to acquit the officers for fear of sparking a new, possibly angrier wave of rioting...