California’s “Racial Justice Act” adopted by the Legislature and signed into law three years ago is the logical result of decades of a national indoctrination campaign by race hustlers and the major media. The narrative driving that campaign is that the American criminal justice system is systemically racist, intentionally singling out blacks for arrest, prosecution, and sentencing, while allowing other races who commit similar crimes to go unpunished or be subject to lesser punishment. As proof of this, they cite state and federal crime data that indicates that blacks are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. The problem with this claim is that it ignores the undisputable fact that blacks commit much more crime than other races in the United States. An article by attorney Hans Bader, author at Liberty Unyielding, focuses on the recent disqualification of a California judge for stating this fact.
Earlier this month a San Diego judge was removed from a case involving the Racial Justice Act by Orange County Assistant Presiding Judge Cheri Pham.
“The Orange County judge disqualified a San Diego judge from hearing cases under California’s Racial Justice Act, citing his statement that ‘There is absolutely no evidence that… the proportion of persons in an ethnicity committing a crime must be the same as the proportion of the population.’ In her ruling, Judge Cheri Pham decided that ‘From his comments, a person aware of the facts could reasonably believe that Judge Shore believes certain racial or ethnic groups commit more crimes than others.’ Never mind the fact that certain racial and ethnic groups do in fact commit more crimes than others.
“It is hard to reconcile Judge Pham’s ruling with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 8-to-1 decision in United States v. Armstrong (1996), where the Supreme Court said there’s no ‘presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes’ at the same rate, since that presumption is ‘contradicted by’ real world data. The Supreme Court in that case rejected a claim that more blacks being prosecuted showed racism.
“It is also hard to reconcile her decision with the Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 ruling noting that it is ‘completely unrealistic’ to think that in the absence of racism, minorities will be represented in a field ‘in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.’ (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)).
“Under the logic of Judge Pham’s ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court is racist, and should be barred from hearing cases involving racial bias or black defendants.”
The Racial Justice Act forces judges to presume that any black offender arrested, charged or serving time in prison is a victim of racial bias and is entitled to reduced charges and/or a reduced sentence. The strength of the evidence and the defendants prior record are irrelevant. If the defendant is black, his priors were also the result of racial bias and should not count.
Pham said such comments could make a person reasonably believe “that Judge Shore believes certain racial or ethnic groups commit more crimes than others and that he will not give weight to statistical evidence that indicates there is an implicit bias against certain racial or ethnic groups.”
Bader goes on to note that ignoring the disproportionate level of black crime also ignores the disproportionate number of black victims:
“….there’s plenty of evidence that crime rates differ, including from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which noted that rates of committing homicide ‘for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites’ between 1976 and 2005, in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. In 2019, 6,425 black people committed homicide, compared to only 4,728 white people, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.
“Arrest rates for different races reflect their crime rates, not — for the most part — racism by the police. A 2021 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at much higher rate than whites, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates, not racism: ‘white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.’ (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018).
“The fact that the black percentage of people arrested was similar to the black percentage of perpetrators of ‘crime reported to police’ is telling, because the people who report violent crimes to police — mainly crime victims — are disproportionately black people themselves. Since victims are overwhelmingly the same race as their attacker, there is no reason to think that they are reporting those crimes out of racism. Most crimes against black people are black-on-black, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. ‘Most violent incidents against white (69%) and black (66%) victims were committed by an offender of the same race or ethnicity as the victim,’ reported the BJS in ‘Criminal Victimization, 2020 – Supplemental Statistical Tables.’ According to FBI data, 89 percent of blacks who were murdered in 2018 were killed by black offenders.”
While California has taken the fiction of systemic racial bias to the extreme — other states, including New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Michigan — have eliminated bail, sanctioned undercharging and reduced sentences for minority defendants in the name of racial justice.
As if more evidence of the effectiveness of the systemic racism propaganda campaign is needed, consider this 2021 survey by the Skeptic Research Center about public perceptions regarding police and racism. The surveyors asked respondents to self identify as very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. The researchers then asked, “how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?” Of very conservatives, 20.28% believed that between 1,000 and 10,000 or more black men were killed by police; of conservatives 13% believed this; of moderates 25.8% thought so; while 38.7% of liberals and 53.5% of very liberal agreed. In 2019, 25 unarmed black men were killed by police. The same survey asked, “what percentage of people killed by police were black.” The responses ranged from 60.4% from very liberal to 37.8% from conservatives. Even the very conservatives thought 44.5% of those killed by police were black. The actual percentage was 24.9%
