The purpose of a trial is to assess the facts in each case, not to settle scores between identity groups.
A New York state judge last week vacated the convictions of two black men in the 1965 murder of Malcolm X. A new investigation had discovered that the New York City Police Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation suppressed evidence that would have absolved the defendants of any wrongdoing. Both men spent about two decades in prison before being paroled. One is deceased, and the other is 83.
Earlier this week, four black men were exonerated by a Florida judge in the alleged kidnapping and rape of a white woman more than 70 years ago. Two of the men were convicted by a jury on little evidence, and two of them were shot and killed by a sheriff and local mob. None of the Groveland Four lived to see their names cleared.
This is the ugly racial history that animates so much of the political commentary on the left as the nation deals with fallout from Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal and the upcoming verdict in a Georgia case involving three white men charged with murder in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, who was black. The past injustices regularly suffered by black defendants are not in dispute. The question is whether social-justice activists today are in fact seeking justice for minority defendants or simply seeking revenge.
Any objective observer of the Rittenhouse trial would have to conclude that justice was the last thing on the prosecutors’ minds. Mr. Rittenhouse was charged in the shooting of three men, two of them fatally, during street protests last year in Kenosha, Wis. The evidence was clear that he wasn’t the aggressor. He was chased, cornered, beaten and had a pistol pointed at him. Only then did he fire his weapon in self-defense. At best, the prosecutors grossly overcharged the defendant. At worst, charges shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. He was acquitted on all counts.
Readers may recall that Marilyn Mosby, the top prosecutor in Baltimore, pulled a similar stunt in 2015, when she charged six police officers with everything from second-degree murder to false arrest after Freddie Gray died in their custody, sparking riots. The prosecutions went nowhere. Three of the officers were acquitted at trial, and charges against the other three eventually were dropped.
Like Mr. Rittenhouse, the Baltimore officers were intended to be sacrificial lambs, however weak the evidence against them. And in both cases pressure was heaped on prosecutors to act out of political expediency. President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have made it clear that they were unhappy with last week’s verdict. Moreover, they have done so in ways that gratuitously racialized the incident, which is what Democratic identity politics today demands of them.
Mr. Biden called Mr. Rittenhouse a white supremacist last year, and Ms. Harris said the outcome shows that “there’s more work to do” to make the “criminal justice system more equitable.” Maybe so, but how was this case, which involved a white shooter and white shooting victims, somehow a manifestation of the racial inequity she alluded to? The president and vice president have every right to share their opinions, but they would have done better if they’d stopped at urging people to accept the verdict and left the editorializing to others.
The same people who are condemning America’s criminal-justice system for the Rittenhouse verdict will celebrate the outcome in the Arbery case if the defendants are found guilty. But true justice is not about ensuring certain outcomes. It is about ensuring a fair process for determining guilt or innocence. Cases shouldn’t be brought to atone for the past, score political points, or satisfy the mob. They should be brought based on facts and evidence. The activists who want prosecutors and juries to disregard such things in the name of equity are seeking payback, not justice.
Most people of goodwill would like to see more racial balance in our criminal-justice system, but that will happen only when there’s more racial balance among those who break the law. That is not a conversation that liberals want to have, unfortunately. They’d rather pretend that high incarceration rates among blacks stem from overpolicing or from racially biased prosecutors and judges and laws. They’d have you believe that the black murder rate is driven by what police did to George Floyd or by what the white defendants in Georgia stand accused of doing to Ahmaud Arbery.
Stacking the system against white defendants today won’t compensate for the past, but it will fuel racial tension and resentment. Mr. Biden campaigned on moving the country in the opposite direction. If he wants to make good on that, he and his vice president should stop using sensational murder trials to pander to their base.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal