Willie D Just Said What Every Black Defendant Is Thinking About The Jury System But Is He RIGHT?

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[00:01:10]It's free, 20 minutes. Speak to a real person. Know your worth. All right. So, this is um former um rapper Willie D. Um he was had he was part of a rap group many many years ago and now he is a very popular podcaster um grown adult um intelligent and he made this remark regarding Carmelo Anony's trial particularly when it comes to a jury across this nation and he was basically saying if you are a black defendant it should be automatically legal or mandatory to have some black jurors. So, let me play this clip.

[00:01:55]>> It should be illegal for a person of any color to be on trial fighting a murder case and not have at least one or two or three people that look like them from their ethnicity judging them. It's kind of like in boxing, right? I'll use the boxing analogy where if you fight, if you're from the United States and you're fighting overseas, you're going to have at least one US judge.

[00:02:31]There's going to be one US judge and there'll be at least one judge from the country that you're fighting in.

[00:02:41]That's the way they do it.

[00:02:43]And I think it might be a judge from a neutral country. One judge from the country that this this guy is from, from that that the foreigner is from. One for the country man. And one that is neutral.

[00:02:59]That is because they want to mitigate favoritism.

[00:03:06]That's how it go. It's human nature. We all come with our own set of implicit biases.

[00:03:12]We're human beings. It would be very disingenuous for us to make a statement that, yo, we can do this. We can be I do believe that a jury, all white jury can judge fairly somebody who's not white.

[00:03:30]No, they can't. No, they can't.

[00:03:34]You might find one. It's a needle in the haststack.

[00:03:38]>> So, before you comment, I do want to say this. I need for you to be very much objective, not your own I don't want and do not insert your own personal feelings about Carmelo Anthony because he's really speaking to jurors in general, particularly it specifically if the defendant is black. So your legal expertise, what is your response to this?

[00:04:02]>> I wasn't particularly being personal with Camilo Anthony. I was just being a man. Now, I've had many, many, many, many trials, as many as anybody in the legal profession over the last 50 years, both as prosecutor, defense attorney, and criminal court judge. Now, let's say there's a matter set for trial at my courtroom.

[00:04:30]I ask everybody, gentlemen, ladies, please be back at 1:30 and we will start selecting a jury or 10:00 the next morning, whatever. Tell one of my baiffs, Mr. Ducket, would you be so kind as to advise our uh jury commissioner that we need 150 prospective jurors? So he brings over 150 prospective jurors.

[00:05:00]Now everybody's name goes in a drum that's spun around with a crank and one of the bales pulls one name out at a time and you get assigned a number.

[00:05:12]There are roughly 14 seats up in the jury box and I'd add eight more down front. By law, it is not necessary to have somebody of the same race on a jury so long as the jury represents the community. With this Anthony thing, it was not an all-white jury. People think it was, but it was not. There were other ethnic groups involved.

[00:05:40]Let's say in my court there was a trial.

[00:05:45]All right? Depending upon how serious the case was, how much pre-trial publicity out there, I would ask the jury commissioner to send over a certain number of prospective jurors, 75, 150, 250. All right?

[00:06:04]Or be on standby since I didn't want them crowding up a blocking the hallways.

[00:06:10]Now, what would happen is when they got in the courtroom, uh, I would give them some pre-charges about what they were there for, etc., etc., and then I'd have one of my baiffs pick a name out of the drum that he had been turning over. So, they got mixed up and they would be assigned the number one through 75, 1 through 150, whatever the case may be. Now, under Tennessee law, we had a situation where the prosecutor had uh five challenges and the defense had seven. And there were the label for those was preemp. You could challenge somebody for any reason at all except because of race.

[00:07:00]I remember one time I looked up and was startled to see some woman sitting in the middle of the front row with a hairdo, making her look exactly like Marge Simpson, all dark purple and everything. And everybody wanted to approach the bench and we just said she'd be too distractive to the proceedings since it was quite a spectacle and she got excused.

[00:07:26]Now, uh, what winds up happening is outside of stuff like that, you get divor jury. You talk to them. Take as long as you want within reasonable limits to find out what they're about and whether they can handle the dish that's going to be put on their plate and whether they're fair and objective and detached.

[00:07:56]And if something about them strikes you as wrong, you can just challenge them and you use up one of your preemp challenges. If somebody says they can't be fair or indicates there's some bias or some connection, a challenge for cause is made or the court does that on its own and exclus excludes somebody for good cause. All right. Now, when we get into the Anthony case, you and I went over this. Several, I think it was four of the prospective black jurors, uh, said they couldn't be impartial because of who the defendant was and they got excused.

[00:08:44]They survived any Batson challenge, which is Batson versus Kentucky. It's a case that says you cannot exclude somebody based on race, ethnicity, or anything like that.

[00:08:57]It has to be something independent of it. You might not like the way they grin because something about it bothers you.

[00:09:06]You can challenge them for that, but not because of their race or ethnicity.

[00:09:12]So, what happens is uh both sides uh get rounds of challenge. You get one episode of what houring the jury, the first group you get in the box. And then uh any further questions from prosecution, any further questions or from defense?

[00:09:31]No. Okay, gentlemen, please submit your challenges. And they put the name on the piece of paper or the names fold it up.

[00:09:39]The baiff brings it up to you. You record it. And Mr. Thompson. Uh, thank you for your attention to these matters, but you will be excused if you will report to the jury commissioner. Blah blah blah. And you read it. All right.

[00:09:55]Then you bring in replacements for those who have been challenged and they get another round of for diary. In other words, to talk to those people or if something else gets suggested by the reactions of the people who've been passed over for challenge, you can ask them. And then any more questions? All right, please submit your challenges.

[00:10:17]And then when it runs down, when everybody has run out of challenges, that's the jury. Then you pick a couple of alternates and you go through that process again. Now, there were black prospective jurors, but in the name of the game, picking people out randomly, all seven black jurors that got to sit up uh in the jury box. Uh, three of them, I think, were excused for cause as a result of their involvement with the school system and four of them were challenged preempily by the state. But the judge did the bats and analysis. And frankly, from what we went over as to the stated reasons for the challenge, they should have been excused for cause because they indicated they were not capable of being fair and impartial and giving the people of the state of Texas a fair trial. So, at some point, you run out of challenges or nobody has any more left. So, you say, "We have a jury." So he's talking like everybody gets to pick. You don't get to pick. I want him.

[00:11:30]I want him. And I want her. And I want her.

[00:11:34]Random lottery pulled out of the barrel, out of the hat, out of the drum. That's who sits in the box and then you get to talk to them to determine whether they can handle the case. So it's just probability that resulted in that jury.

[00:11:52]I think what he's talking about is biases because listen, these are regular citizens. They are not law experts. They probably don't know much about the law.

[00:12:02]They're not lawyers, not judges, not law clerks, not law students, nothing. So, they are they are coming in with biases if you have any. We all love it.

[00:12:13]>> So, no, let me finish. So, he's speaking to the fact he's speaking to biases. So if somebody come in there, whether they're Hispanic, white, just someone who is non-black, specifically nonfoundational black, they may already come in with biases. You don't know cuz a lot of times people hold their biases inside, but you you are going to make a determination. It's it's a big possibility. You can make a judgment or determination using your biases when you have to go back into the jury room and come up with whatever verdict guilty.

[00:12:48]What are you going to do about it?

[00:12:50]>> So that's why he's saying that it should be mandatory if the defendant is black that it should be somebody automatically.

[00:12:57]>> So you're going to pass an amendment to the US Constitution that says in all jury trials, uh, the jury must ex include at least two people of the same ethnicity as the defendant. See, that's not going to work because it's not neutral.

[00:13:17]That goes against the constitution because you have you cannot and then also it goes to you should judge a person by their character and not their skin color >> and also to this day I get calls right now judge my granddad told me to call you. Yes man, what's the problem? I really can't afford to take off from work. What can I do to get out of from of jury duty? I'm not going to tell you cuz I think you need to serve. But, you know, I really can't afford to go there. I heard uh that if I say I can't be fair to the state or something like that or the prosecution, that'll get me knocked off.

[00:13:57]I'm not commenting. And they go in and um my grandson told me, Joe, that uh he told them that he couldn't be fair to the state, so he got off. I didn't tell him that. He suggested it. I told him I thought he should serve. See, so a lot of people don't want to miss out on work, their dinner, their television, their entertainment. So they don't want to do the jury service because that means sitting for hours without being able to talk and paying attention to what somebody else is saying. Some lawyers are boring as hell and some put on a good show and keep everybody's attention. So >> that's the thing here because he said that he can't afford to take off work but jury duty your job is allows you to and they pay you.

[00:14:46]>> I know that but that's they just don't want to serve and then on a jury on a case like this which actually is pretty routine. I'd say seven to eight uh homicide cases out of every 10 are just like this except instead of being at a track meet that's at a ball game, a park, a concert, a nightclub, a bar or something like that. I want to swing it back to Willie D because basically what you're saying, what he is alluding to is going to require a change in the Constitution or some amendment.

[00:15:22]>> If you want to cure the problem, you know what it is. Don't try to get off the jury. You about it's justice means just us. Well, keep your ass on the jury cuz all it takes is one contrary vote to tie up a jury.

[00:15:40]But they don't and they talk smack about it afterwards and it's their fault that it is an all white jury. Not all the time. Uh I filed a brief 12,482 pages hardbound in a case involving a young black kid in the seventh grade who supposedly killed three white women. And one of the three grounds that the Arkansas Supreme Court, which was all white, all male, relied upon unanimously to set the conviction aside was a Batson situation where black jurors were improperly excluded. But I knew what the devil I was doing as a defense lawyer.

[00:16:23]And I set it up perfectly by the questions that I asked when I challenged the challenge.

[00:16:31]>> Wait a minute.

[00:16:31]>> And got to ask questions. Hold on. Hold on. You said a a black sevenyear-old boy supposedly >> No, he was in the seventh grade. His black kid supposedly killed three white people. He got this from >> Arkansas.

[00:16:44]The case is Ron Ward if you want to look it up.

[00:16:48]>> And you were the lawyer?

[00:16:49]>> Yes. and I filed a 12,482page hardbound brief detailing everything I could find about capital punishment about the law involved in the situation and I had assistance of a guy that was a preacher. He was the local attorney over there. So, we got a unanimous decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court after they intervened uh 23 minutes before he was supposed to be executed. So, I know something about Batson and excluding improperly excluding black jurors and I set it up so it would be adequate for an appellet uh reversal. Now, that's what happened.

[00:17:38]The guy is now dead. somebody killed him. But, you know, it's a thing that was what it was. And that's been 45 years ago when racism was a lot more prominent down here than it is now.

[00:17:53]Very much more so.

[00:17:56]And uh yeah, but see a lot of times when they got a whole black they got a whole white jury. It wasn't all white. They excluded black folks. So, it's just us. No, it's not just us. It's that the black prospectives excuse themselves by the lame reasons they put in front of the court as to why they couldn't be jurors.

[00:18:24]See, that's the untold story.