Diversity Destroyed the Jury System

A Jury of Your "Peers"

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Taking a break from history for a bit after Part I and Part II in the story of the White Rajahs of Sarawak, today’s article can be thought of as an addendum to the recent post on the huge destruction wrought by disparate impact; it turns out, the jury system has been destroyed for much the same reason. If you find this article interesting, please tap the heart icon to “like” it so that the algorithm knows to promote it. Thanks again!

There is one image that reflects how America returned to the highly racialized, tribal atmosphere of the ‘60s and ‘70s. It comes from back before the George Floyd riots, before the “hands up don’t shoot” absurdity, and even from before Obama said his son would look like Trayvon Martin—a thug and petty criminal. It is, rather, from the OJ Simpson case. Specifically, it is from when the verdict was announced. A collection of Americans, about half white and half black, sit watching the TV as the verdict—not guilty because one of the cops said a mean word about a murderous criminal—is announced: the whites are horrified and sit in stunned silence, and the blacks are cheering wildly. A man got away with a murder that everyone knew he committed, and half the room is happy because of his race. Yes, that picture exists. Here it is:

The reason why that image sticks in the craw to the extent it does is that it is a visualization of what we have long sensed, but have trouble putting into words:

Justice is not real in a multicultural society. There is only the racial headcount, the raising of hands based on ethnic affinity. Further, whichever group comes last to the conclusion that their votes are votes not for policy but for existence, is the group that will likely lose.

And make no mistake: those cheering understood what was happening. As one black juror in the case put it, 90% of the jurors (there were 9 blacks, 2 whites, and 1 Hispanic) understood that OJ was guilty; they knew he did it, and admitted as much.¹ But they also understood that it was a racial case, and so they let him go free as “revenge” for Rodney King,² a career criminal³ who was beaten by the police. The jury trial was a racial headcount, and played out exactly as one might expect…as a racial headcount in which murder was legalized by a jury so long as the victim was white and the murderer black.

Hence the poignancy of the above image. It shows the feeling captured at the time by journalist Jonathan Tilove: “That giant sucking sound you heard Tuesday was white America gasping with the announcement that a Los Angeles jury had cleared O.J. Simpson of murder charges. That outburst of joy was black America celebrating.”⁴

Unfortunately, the OJ trial wasn’t a one-off sparked by the intense anger and emotions of the day. It was, rather, an indication of where things were going that has been amply confirmed by the data, and is exactly in line with a problem involving very different races observed by Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore half a century ago.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] Diversity Destroyed the Jury System

The Data: Jury Trials Don’t Work

There is one particularly useful study on this point. Titled Racial Bias in Mock Juror Decision-Making: A Meta-Analytic Review of Defendant Treatment by researchers Tara Mitchell, Ryann Haw, Jeffrey Pfeifer, and Christian Meissner, it delved deeply into the data of how racial bias affects a jury’s decision-making, dissecting the decisions of thousands of jurors in dozens of prior studies.⁵ Specifically, it examined in what cases racial in-group preference and out-group bias proved impactful upon black and white jurors.

The researchers went into the study expecting that the “common wisdom” surrounding jury trials would be true—that whites would be more likely to treat black defendants harshly and react leniently to white defendants. As they put it, “Common wisdom seems to suggest that racial bias, defined as disparate treatment of minority defendants, exists in jury decision-making, with Black defendants being treated more harshly by jurors than White defendants.”⁶

In reality, they found that the opposite is largely true: race tends to have little if any effect on the decisions made by white jurors, whereas it is reasonably predictive of what decision black jurors will make. In other words, whites exhibited a very low in-group preference when on juries, largely exercising their duty to be impartial jurors. Black jurors, on the other hand, exhibited a notable in-group bias in which they were more likely to be hostile to white defendants and friendly to black defendants. Here are the findings, I’ll explain them below (and this is a bit academic, for which I do apologize, but the conclusion is very important):

As you can see, the study’s authors used a measure called effect size (the “d” column on the right-hand side of the chart) to show how strong the differences were between white and black jurors, in decision-making. Effect size is a way to understand the importance of a difference between two groups, beyond just knowing if the difference exists; it quantifies the standardized difference between two group means. In other words, it shows how much one group differs from another in a way that’s easy to compare across studies, which is useful here because the group mean of in-group preference for blacks and whites had to be compared across dozens of different studies. In this case, the study found that black jurors had an effect size (d) of 0.428, while white jurors had a much smaller effect size of 0.028.

That is important, and incredibly revealing. For one, the mere magnitude of the difference is astounding: the magnitude of in-group preference shown by black jurors was over 15 times that of white jurors.

More importantly, the differences could be even more pronounced, given what they represent statistically. Generally, an effect size (d value) in the 0.2 range is considered small, one close to 0.5 is considered moderate, and 0.8 is considered large. Here, the white effect size of 0.028 is not only minimal, but so small as to be statistically non-significant. Meanwhile, the black juror value of 0.428 indicates that race exercises a noticeable impact on their decision-making and is large enough to represent a real pattern of behavior demonstrating a noticeable in-group preference amongst jurors that should be impartial.

Two conclusions can thus be drawn from the study, which examined dozens of studies and thousands of juror decisions.⁷

The first is that the mainstream message pushed about white jurors being irredeemably racist or biased in their decision-making regarding the treatment of black and white defendants is entirely false. In fact, there’s no statistically significant relationship there, meaning that in all but the rarest cases, there is likely no in-group preference acted upon at all. White jurors are, thus, generally impartial and do their legal duty as members of a jury.

The second conclusion is that the opposite is true of black jurors. Whereas white jurors appear to generally be impartial regardless of whatever their personal feelings or biases might be, black jurors tend to make decisions that align with their in-group preference. That is not to say they always do—the effect is moderate rather than deterministic—but they do so at a high enough rate for it to be frequent and statistically significant. And the magnitude of that acted-upon racialist impulse is not merely more than white jurors, but over 15x that of the acted-upon white in-group preference.

That is a massive problem. It means that if you are a white individual in a case with black jurors—regardless of whether you are the defendant or the victim of a black defendant—it is likely that you will not get justice for purely racial reasons. They will either push the whole jury into a decision hostile to your interests, or refuse to go along with the general verdict, thus creating a hung jury. That’s not to say it’s impossible you will get fair and impartial justice, but it is unlikely. So, there is strong evidence that those black jurors are committing jury nullification, which is where a jury reaches a verdict that is contrary to the law, despite the evidence presented.

Anecdotal evidence⁸ confirms this impression and indicates that it has probably gotten much worse since the original study.

The Reality: They Actually Don’t Work

There has been much anecdotal evidence of this general pattern since the OJ trial indicated it was becoming a problem, and the Racial Bias in Mock Juror Decision-Making study confirmed as much. Most states do not release data or details on the races of jurors and how they voted, making it guesswork to look at any of these. However, with the above evidence in mind, it is pretty easy to understand what happened and why in a few notorious jury rulings. There are countless examples of this, but to respect your time, I will just give four, two well-known and two somewhat under the radar.

The Ethan Liming Slaying

Ethan Liming was a high school student who, after an altercation involving a water gun and Liming’s friends, was beaten to death by three thugs—Deshawn Stafford (20), Tyler Stafford (19), and their cousin Donovon Jones (21)—who were playing basketball at the Lebron James “I Promise” school in Akron, Ohio.⁹

According to reports, they confronted Liming and beat him to death, first hitting him in the head repeatedly and then stomping on him until he died, as his friends cowered in the car. A shoeprint was found impressed on his chest, revealing that he had not simply fallen after being hit in the head but had been stomped to death. He also appears to have been stomped in the head. That stomping of the defenceless, likely unconscious young man killed him. It was murder.

Exactly what could be expected given the above data appears to have played out in the jury trial. Some of the jurors appear to have been black,¹⁰ and the jury found largely in favor of the black defendants. Deshawn and Tyler Stafford were found not guilty of one count of involuntary manslaughter for Liming's death, and the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the other involuntary manslaughter charge against Deshawn Stafford, so a mistrial was declared for that charge. Both Deshawn and Tyler Stafford were found not guilty of a third-degree charge of involuntary manslaughter as a proximate result of committing or attempting to commit assault. However, Deshawn Stafford was found guilty of both aggravated assault and assault, and Tyler Stafford was found guilty of assault.

Describing what happened, Liming attorney James A. Gutierrez said, “The Liming Family yet again was victimized by jury nullification where the jury ignored proven facts to come back with an inconsistent verdict.” Jury nullification is exactly what one would predict of a diverse jury in a case like this, and it is exactly what happened…much like with OJ, the racial bias problem was borne out in real life.

The Derek Chauvin BLM Juror

Perhaps the most notorious court case in America over the past five years, excepting anything having to do with Epstein, is that of Derek Chauvin, the cop who restrained George Floyd and was accused of murdering him.

As a reminder, George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose after getting caught using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy a banana from a gas station. The police were called after the clerk realized it was fake, and Officer Chauvin approached Floyd’s vehicle. Floyd, a drug dealer, swallowed all the fentanyl he had on him, which was (literally) enough to kill a horse. He then had the usual symptoms of a fentanyl overdose, such as being unable to breathe, as the police tried restraining him. He eventually died, and the coroner found he had no life-threatening injuries but did have overdose levels of fentanyl in him.¹¹

Chauvin was brought to trial anyway, and the highly racialized trial went exactly how one who saw the OJ trial or read the juror in-group bias report might expect. The jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree murder, among other offences. He has since been stabbed repeatedly in prison.

Of course, the jury is known to have been biased. Two jurors were even aligned directly with BLM (Black Lives Matter). Juror 9, a black grandmother, directly associated herself with the BLM message by saying, “I am Black. My life matters.” Another juror, Brandon Mitchell, hadn’t even told the court he was a BLM supporter and was caught after the trial in apparel like a t-shirt with the words “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” and “BLM,” and a cap with “BLM” on it. The pictures came from the “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” Commitment March in 2020, well before the Chauvin verdict or trial.

There is no way such a man could be impartial (though Mitchell, of course, insisted he was)! He was directly aligned with the movement and group opposing Chauvin, and was wearing a shirt accusing Chauvin of wrongdoing. Further, he was aligned with that before the trial began! That is a clear case of jury nullification, as he couldn’t be impartial. Yet he was allowed to get away with it, was allowed to vote based on in-group preference, and now Mr. Chauvin is suffering because of it.

The Ari Young Incident

There are other such examples. Take the case¹² of Ari Young (black) and Meagan McCarthy (white). McCarthy was a San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputy who received a frantic 911 call from a mother who was begging for help in saving her son before the line went silent. Deputy McCarthy raced to the home and, when she arrived, she was confronted by a thuggish man—Ari Young.

When she tried to pat him down for a weapon, he went berserk and assaulted her. He pummelled her in the face, stole her service weapon, and started discharging it while pointing it at her face (it jammed, saving her). Deputy McCarthy was left with a concussion, a dislocated eye socket, black eyes, multiple contusions, and a broken thumb; she eventually had to retire due to PTSD.

The whole incident was captured on video by a neighbor, and there was no doubt that it was Young in the video. Yet the jurors refused to convict Young on the most serious charges, including ones he was caught on tape committing, such as assaulting a peace officer and resisting arrest. California doesn’t release details on the races of the jurors, but it is alleged that at least some of the jurors were black, and the outcome is entirely what one would expect based on the cited study.

Calvin Ushery and Chang Suh

Similarly, there is the case of the thuggish Calvin Ushery (black) attacking a 68-year-old gold and jewelry store owner, Chang Suh (Asian).

Ushery, a repeat offender with a slew of felonies under his belt, viciously assaulted Mr. Suh. He pistol-whipped the old man, beat him 28 times (including hitting him with a hammer twice), and then stomped on his head, leaving him unconscious. He was caught on tape committing the assault, with there being no doubt that it was he who committed the assault. A city councilmember described it as “air-tight.”¹³

Ushery then wiped down the surfaces of the store to hide his fingerprints and bolted with $100,000 worth of jewelry. He rode away on a bike that was later found in his apartment by detectives. A week later, he was caught on camera trying to sell the stolen jewelry to pawn shops and was arrested while trying to sell some of it at a local gas station.

Despite the plethora of evidence that it was Ushery, a felon convicted multiple times, who committed the crime and was caught on tape committing multiple elements of it, from the beating itself to selling the stolen goods, the jury, which was allegedly¹⁴ “mostly black,” refused to convict him. The case instead ended in a hung jury, with the jurors refusing to admit that Ushery committed the crimes he was caught on tape committing, so he walked free. This is what one would expect of a diverse jury given the cited study.

Fortunately, prosecutors tried again in 2024 and convinced a jury to convict Ushery.

Directionally Disastrous

Of course, all of those are just examples, and perhaps race wasn’t a factor in the cases where we know not what the demographics of the jurors were or how they voted. However, there is enough anecdotal evidence to indicate that the study holds true, and this remains a growing problem.

One account on X who has written an article for this publication¹⁵ noted a personal experience with it, saying, “In the 90s, my father was a juror on a murder trial. The defendant was black. The victim was black. 11-1 verdict. The one hold out? A black juror. He told us she said, ‘I just don’t believe a black boy would kill another black boy.’”¹⁶

Another acquaintance of mine on X, a lawyer named David Pivtorak, noted: “My first experience with this was when I was at the Brooklyn DA's office and ended up with a hung jury on an airtight gun case. The couple of black jurors who refused to convict basically admitted that was the reason why. It's the open secret of the legal community that gets you ostracized for even mentioning it.”¹⁷

There are, of course, counterexamples. This doesn’t happen every time, and many people do their duty regardless of race. The study found a moderate relationship after all, not a determinative one.

However, the issue is not that it happens every time. Whether Ethan Liming’s killers, Calvin Ushery, or Ari Young, perhaps racial in-group bias wasn’t to blame for the obscene and absurd jury decisions. We don’t know in those, though we can suspect what happened based on what was clearly and admittedly the case in the Chauvin and OJ trials. But still, the lurking question remains: was this a just trial, or was the outcome determined by racial preferences?

That is a major problem, and racialized outcomes have cropped up often enough that it’s a fair question. If you were the parents of Ethan Liming, remembering what happened when you were younger and the OJ verdict was delivered, would you think he got a fair trial? Or would you think certain members of the jury had done exactly what those in the OJ case did and voted their skin color rather than closely and impartially examining the facts? Obviously the latter. All of us think that. It’s why the aforementioned cases—and the dozens of others like them¹⁸—are so resonant.

And that is a problem. It means the jury system not only can’t be trusted, but isn’t trusted. Diversity has destroyed the jury system, something that was once seen as a bedrock of the Anglo legal system to which we are accustomed and around which our system is built. If we can’t trust a “jury of our peers” because it’s not actually composed of our peers, but rather cretins who hate us and are willing to be derelict in the duty of impartiality, what else can’t we trust?

Singapore Shows This Always Happens

While the racial problem is particularly true in America, much the same is true elsewhere. For example, the United Kingdom is now overwhelmed by diversity¹⁹ imported by the ruling class, and it too is finding jury nullification as those non-whites vote based on race rather than law and fact.²⁰

Much like in America, there the natives appear to vote based not on race but rather on fact, with there being no yawning gap between whether they find whites or non-whites guilty. Meanwhile, the “newcomers” vote to convict whites nearly 75% of the time, but non-whites less than 25% of the time!

That is injustice. It’s state-allowed jury nullification. It should also be entirely expected: the reason that Singapore doesn’t have jury trials, generally, is that they can’t be trusted. Lee Kuan Yew found over half a century ago that, in a multicultural and “diverse” society, all forms of voting devolve into a racial headcount. Elections are ethnic turnout contests, and jury trials are luck of the draw based on how many co-ethnics you get.

Describing why he was so opposed to jury trials in his From Third World to First, Lee Kuan Yew notes that he saw firsthand how ethnic considerations came first and justice last with such systems:

After being called to the Singapore Bar in 1951, my first case was to defend four rioters charged with the murder of an RAF sergeant during the "jungle girl" Muslim riots against whites in December 1950. I got all four men acquitted, but it left me with grave doubts about the practical value of the jury system for Singapore. Seven men, deciding by majority verdict, made for easy acquittals. The jury system had also been tried in India, failed, and was abolished. Soon after I became prime minister in 1959, I abolished the jury system for all cases except murder. I retained this exception to keep in line with the law in Malaya at that time. In 1969, after separation from Malaysia, I asked Eddie Barker as minister for law to move a bill in Parliament abolishing the jury system for murder trials. During a parliamentary select committee meeting, David Marshall, then our most successful criminal lawyer, claimed he had 99 acquittals out of the 100 cases he defended for murder. When I asked if he believed the 99 acquitted had been wrongly charged, Marshall replied his duty was to defend them, not judge them.

Describing the incident in a BBC interview, Yew further discussed how the racial angle of the case played out, noting that he "worked on the weaknesses of the jury -- their biases, their prejudices, their reluctance really to find four Mussulmen [Muslims] guilty of killing in cold blood or in a heat of great passion, religious passion, an RAF officer, his wife and child." Continuing, he explained how he used legal tricks and technicalities to further push the jury away from conviction—despite the four men obviously being guilty—saying that he used "the simple tricks of advocacy -- contradictions between one witness and another, contradiction between a witness and his previous statement to the police and the preliminary enquiry."²¹

He went on to explain that the jury went along with the ethnic in-group bias asked of it and acquitted the four men, at which point, "The judge was thoroughly disgusted. I went home feeling quite sick because I knew I'd discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong." Lee added that he was left feeling that jury trials were a "foolish, completely incongruous system."

So, Singapore got rid of the jury system and its allowance of ethnic grievance. The result? “After the bill was passed and jury trials were abolished, there were fewer miscarriages of justice arising from the vagaries of jury sentiments,” Yew wrote.

Where We Are

The simple truth is that the jury trial system no longer works well. So much is obvious. It clearly can’t deliver justice because of the tendency for jurors, particularly black jurors, to side with co-ethnics rather than vote based on what the evidence shows and what is just.

Originally, the term “a jury of one’s peers” had meaning: members of the peerage (the British Aristocracy) could choose to be tried by each other in the House of Lords rather than in a normal court. “Peers” meant broadly similar people, drawn from a locality composed largely of people with similar outlooks and backgrounds, not any collection of ne’er-do-wells with nothing better to do than sit on a jury panel.

Now, not so much. You can be like Derek Chauvin and get lumped with a bunch of people who are the opposite of you, and admit they hate you, judging you in a life-or-death trial. Does that sound fair? Obviously not, and we all know it.

That is, to put it mildly, a major issue.

You cannot exercise your right to self-defense and be confident in that decision because a biased jury might think you were “racist” in defending yourself rather than just handing over your wallet, and find you guilty. Maybe it will get overturned on appeal…but maybe not.

You cannot trust that a criminal who assaults you or murders your son will face justice, even if the defendant is a repeat felon who was caught on tape committing the crime and admits to having done it. The jury might just decide it doesn’t want to convict a black guy, as in the case of Ethan Liming.

You cannot trust that if you do your duty reasonably and well—as Derek Chauvin did—that the court system will back you up. Maybe the jury will be mad that you are white and the dead guy black, and so BLM enthusiasts will vote to send you to prison where you can be stabbed to death by co-ethnics of the BLM jurors, for the same reasons they sent you to jail in the first place.

Then again, maybe none of that will happen. Maybe your case is one of those where things work out as they more or less should given the evidence, and you don’t face unjust imprisonment. But you can never be sure…diversity and multiculturalism have killed any ability to put justified faith in the jury system.

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1. https://x.com/zarathustra5150/status/1943651852077203895

2. Yes, they actually said this: https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/o-j-simpson-juror-admits-believed-simpson-guilty-him-off-payback

You can watch her here: https://x.com/TheXReportCard/status/1778450837788062134

3. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lapd/kingarrests.html

4. https://jonathantilove.com/white-gasps-black-cheers/

5. The study: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-00971-001

6. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-00971-001

7. “A total of 46 independent effect sizes from 34 studies, representing the responses of 7,397 participants, were located for the analysis of racial bias on juror verdict decisions. Sixteen studies, representing 20 independent effect sizes and 3,141 participants, were identified for the analysis of racial bias on sentencing decisions.”

8. Some of the following cases are noted by Scott Greer here:

Trial By Jury Is Now A Joke

9. https://im1776.com/2023/10/02/ethan-liming/

10. Juror demographic data is hard to come by, but anecdotal reports indicate the jury was “diverse” and biased against liming. Ex: https://x.com/HamrickPaul/status/1921703721790001551

11. https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1922757067833487427

12. https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-man-who-pummeled-shot-at-female-deputy-found-not-guilty-despite-video-of-attack

13. https://www.newsnationnow.com/danabramslive/jury-unable-to-reach-verdict-in-delaware-jewelry-shop-attack/

14. Video and jury claim here: https://x.com/UltraDane/status/1719584527314731260

15.

16. https://x.com/DEI4WhiteGuys/status/1943368738289660115

17. https://x.com/TheDavidPiv/status/1943386834492608563

18. A more recent example is the case of Darrell E. Brooks Jr. On November 21, 2021, Brooks drove an SUV through the annual Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people and injuring sixty-two others. The victims were mostly white, and the attack occurred within forty-eight hours of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict (although this motivation was never definitively proven). Brooks represented himself in court using fringe arguments from the Moorish sovereign citizen movement. A convoluted mess of ahistorical and pseudo-legal jargon culminated in the theory that American common law does not apply to black people. He was allowed to spend several hours a day bullying witnesses, most of whom were the parents or siblings of his victims, before finally attempting a Hail Mary strategy he had learned about online: jury nullification.

Or consider the cases of Devon Dunham, Billy Chemirmir, and Lemrick Nelson, all murderers who either confessed to their crimes, or were caught or recorded in the act. “I need your truck,” Dunham said, before he fired eight shots at a former Hardeeville volunteer fire chief from a 9mm handgun in 2017. He later confessed to police that he intentionally murdered 77-year-old Ernest Stevens. A jury deliberated for an hour and forty-five minutes before finding him not guilty. Chemirmir, a serial killer who murdered 22 elderly white people in Dallas, and Nelson, who stabbed Hasidic student Yankel Rosenbaum during the 1991 Crown Heights riot, also received not guilty verdicts or mistrials.

From: https://im1776.com/2023/10/02/ethan-liming/

19. Discussed here:

20. You can read the study here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-institute/files/diversity-fairness-in-the-jury-system.pdf

21. https://www.postcolonialweb.org/singapore/government/leekuanyew/lky2.html