News - Everybody in the pool

Can Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin get a fair trial without accusing the citizens of Fulton County of racism?

Now we'll never know.

Since Sept. 11, Al-Amin and his lawyers have been working overtime to keep the subject of anti-Islamic sentiment front and center in his trial. It matters not one whit to them that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Manis has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep these alleged biases out of the courtroom. She moved the trial date, ordered up the largest pool of potential jurors in Fulton County history and is screening them extensively for anti-Muslim attitudes.

Manis' actions ought to instill trust in the workings of the court. But acknowledging that trustworthiness would mean relinquishing the defense's all-important game of racial filibuster — in which defense attorneys levy endless, groundless accusations of racism in order to grind the wheels of justice to a halt.

Meanwhile, in Gwinnett County, racial filibustering over another jury pool threatens to further delay the trial of Wesley Harris, who is accused of killing 22-year-old Whitney Land and her 2-year-old daughter, Jordan, in 1999. Whitney and Jordan were kidnapped from a public park, shot to death and burned in the trunk of their car. Harris' attorney, Christine A. Koehler, is claiming that her client cannot get a fair trial because some minorities are under-represented in the county's new jury pool. "This is a diverse community that has to be reflected in the jury pool," Koehler told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "[T]hat's what we're fighting for on behalf of Mr. Harris."

Strong words. But the minority group to which Harris belongs isn't actually under-represented in Gwinnett's new jury pool — it's over-represented. Harris is black, and there's a higher percentage of blacks in the new jury pool than there are in the county's population. Asian-Americans, by contrast, are under-represented in the jury pool by 4.5 percent. Is Christine Koehler actually suggesting that Wesley Harris cannot get a fair trial in Gwinnett County because there may not be enough Asian-American potential jurors for his case?

There is another motive for Koehler's complaint: the obvious one — that she considers it her job to insist, with strategic gloominess, that her client cannot get a fair trial under any circumstances, not anywhere, not ever. A half-century ago, there's a good chance Koehler would've been right.

But Koehler has no case today. Barriers to entering the jury pool are no longer punitive and prejudiced; they're circumstantial — and these circumstances are hardly being ignored. Just as Judge Manis is doing in the Al-Amin trial, local governments everywhere are making good-faith efforts to diversify their jury pools, efforts that will gradually pay off as new immigrant groups learn the language, register to vote, and obtain driver's licenses and permanent addresses.

When will all these efforts be enough? For those engaged in the game of racial filibustering, no effort to produce so-called diversity in jury pools will ever be enough — in part because it's not even the point in the first place. The point is to get your client off at any cost. And the cost of this game is never borne by defendants or their counsel anyway; it's borne in sharply painful ways by victims and their families who, ironically, comprise two classes of citizens excluded from juries with impunity by defense attorneys who assert that this type of exclusion is perfectly legitimate.

The cost of courtroom racial filibustering is also borne in subtle ways by the rest of us, who must endure the divisiveness sown by incessant and unanswerable charges of racism aimed at our public institutions and at ourselves.

As if we're all guilty until proven innocent — or at least exposed for the unreconstructed bigots that we are — in the snake pit of the Fulton County Justice Center's jury pool at the corner of Pryor Street and Tobacco Road.

Tina Trent has never been empanelled.??