Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Brett Kavanaugh may or may not be an attempted rapist, but one thing is clear. The Republican senators are according him all the honors of white privilege. That includes a presumption of innocence that statistically speaking, white juries do not accord African-American defendants.
One in every six women in the United States, 17.7 million women in total, have been victims of rape or attempted rape.
7 in every 8 sexual assault victims are women.
Rape thus disproportionately targets women. Another disproportion is rates of conviction and length of sentences with regard to African-Americans charged with this crime.
Samuel R. Gross, Maurice Possley, and Klara Stephens have shown that African-Americans show up in cases of exoneration from crimes they did not actually commit at many times the rates of whites. That is, African-Americans are 13% of the US population but they make up a *majority* of persons exonerated when DNA tests are now administered.
*innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people.
- *Police officers were found to have engaged in misconduct at a rate 22% higher when dealing with African-American defendants than in the case of other races.
The system on average puts African-American defendants in jail for 3 times longer than white defendants.
- *An African-American convicted of sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than whites convicted of the same crime.
* White victims misidentifying suspects seems to account for some of the discrepency
* but just plain old racism accounts for large numbers of falsely accused African-Americans
Whites and Blacks use recreational drugs aat about the same rate.
- *But innocent African-Americans are five times more likely to be found guilty of drug crimes than innocent white people.
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Bonus video:
The Young Turks: “America’s Injustice System: PROOF Of Institutional Racism”
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