DID YOU KNOW? Jurors don’t always get it right? In 1976, at just 24 years old, Menaker voted to convict Frederick Burton, a black revolutionary, of the murder of a prison warden in Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison. Today, she believes she did not have enough information to fairly determine his guilt or innocence. What she does know now is that her naivete and white privilege may have led her to reach the wrong verdict. Meanwhile, Burton has languished in prison for nearly 50 years.
Menaker’s experience highlights how easily jurors can make mistakes that can’t be undone. Jurors can be negatively influenced by their privilege, their unconscious biases, and of course the small amount of knowledge about a case that they are given by the judge, attorneys, witnesses, etc. Even with these limitations, jurors can often do their job well. But sometimes they make mistakes, and, as a result, people are unfairly convicted. While unfair convictions may not be the status quo, even one wrongly incarcerated person is one too many.
