Online NewsHour: Racial Justice – February 26, 1996

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CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: For more on today’s Supreme Court hearing, we’re joined by Stuart Taylor, correspondent for "The American Lawyer" and "Legal Times" and a NewsHour regular. Stuart, thank you for joining us. There’s probably not much to add to that, but is there anything else that we need to know that clarifies exactly what it is that the court heard today?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Well, they–what they have is a relatively narrow piece of a big social issue. The big social issue is whether we have racial bias in our criminal justice system, and there are lots of statistics showing huge, hugely disproportionate numbers of blacks being locked up for certain crimes, particularly drug crimes, and especially crack cocaine, which has huge penalties. The narrower issue the court is deciding is whether the defendants in this case have made enough of a preliminary showing to get to first base, as it is, as it were in trying the very difficult task of proving race-based selective prosecution which, if proven, is a violation of the Constitution and would justify throwing out the cases against them.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And where would that take us? I mean, where would that leave us in the whole issue of selective prosecution?

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