Race, Gender and the Zimmerman Trial

Now that the selection of the jury has been completed, the trial of George Zimmerman for shooting African American teenager Trayvon Martin is even more likely to be the most racially charged trail since that of O.J. Simpson. What’s more, gender will now be important as well.

Much to the disappointment of Martin’s family and civil rights advocates, the jury will include absolutely no African Americans. In addition, none of the four alternate jurors are African American. According to census figures, Florida’s Seminole County, where the trial will take place, is 11% African American.

As recently as fifty years ago, Florida did not even allow women to serve on juries, but, in the Zimmerman trial, all of the jurors will be women. Five of the six jurors have children, and two of the four alternate jurors are also women with children.

In an ideal world, the race and gender of the jurors in a trial such as Zimmerman’s would make no difference. However, Jose Baez, lead counsel in the successful defense of Casey Anthony for killing her daughter Caylee, said the racial make-up of the Zimmerman jury made the case a “slam dunk” for the defense. Widener Law Professor Jules Epstein, meanwhile, argued that the female jurors would be especially sympathetic to the loss of a child and therefore would empathize with Martin’s grieving mother.

I lack the experience to make an intelligent prediction about either the outcome of the trial or the significance race and gender will have in that outcome. Nevertheless, I’m certain that considerations of race and gender will be important in the court of public opinion. Despite ideological pronouncements that all are equal in the eyes of the law, the American public does not take this to actually be true. Americans believe that race, gender, and wealth are major factors in what the legal system produces and invites us to take as “justice.”

 

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Life in the Digital Age: Is There Such a Thing as a Reasonable Expectation of Privacy?

A few weeks ago, I presented a webinar about the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. In preparation, I tried to find out as much as I can about the different ways law enforcement uses technology in investigations and if and when those uses constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment. What I discovered, boiled down to its most basic, is that if law enforcement can do it in a low-tech way, they can do it high tech. So, for example, if an officer standing on the sidewalk could see into your backyard, then a camera placed on a pole with the same viewpoint would work just as well.

The leading case right now is United States v. Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court’s GPS case from last summer, authored by Justice Scalia. Originally, whether something constituted a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment had been closely tied to common-law trespass and a person’s connection to property. Over the years, the property-based approach was somewhat pushed aside and the focus was on protecting people, not places. The concept “reasonable expectation of privacy” was born and had been the focus of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Then came Jones. Jones circles back to property and the concept of trespass. Under Jones, trespass plus an effort to obtain information is a search, warranting the protections of the Fourth Amendment.

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Same-Sex Marriage as Divorce

supreme courtBack in 2010, I wrote an article (published in January 2011) asking the question of, essentially, what if the states became stuck on the question of whether same-sex couples could get married? What if they divided, half of them banning same-sex marriages as an affront to the dignity of marriage, and half of them insisting upon the right of their citizens to marry someone of the same sex? Would the states be locked into a patchwork quilt of marriage and non-marriage, with married couple’s rights fading in and out of existence as they crossed the country, or was there some way out of the dilemma?

Our system was born federalist in 1789 but has been getting progressively more nationalist ever since. Most issues that divide the country can be resolved in some way at the national level, either by Congress passing a law under its increasingly expansive Commerce or Spending Clause powers, or by the Supreme Court wielding the Bill of Rights and the Due Process or Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. But that does not cover the universe of potentially divisive issues. Particularly destabilizing are social statuses designated by state law but not one of the “suspect classifications” of the Equal Protection Clause. For example, same-sex marriage.

In my article, I considered a way to resolve the inevitable disputes that would arise if the system became stuck: half the states recognizing same-sex marriage, half not, and the Supreme Court unwilling to extend Equal Protection doctrine to cover sexual orientation. But towards the end, I noted another possible outcome: the dispute over same-sex marriage could follow the path divorce did in the early twentieth century.

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