Access to The Champion archive is one of many exclusive member benefits. It’s normally restricted to just NACDL members. However, this content, and others like it, is available to everyone in order to educate the public on why criminal justice reform is a necessity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This January the world marks what would have been Dr. King’s 85th birthday, and just a few months ago we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech he delivered there. These are occasions for us to pause and reflect on how far we’ve come as a nation in delivering justice to the immense racial inequality that Dr. King and other activists worked to address. I grew up in a Kentucky where schools, public transportation, and many other parts of life were segregated. In many ways I am proud of the progress our nation has made in recent decades.
But while we have achieved much in certain areas, the presence of racial inequality in the criminal justice system remains both rife and intolerable. As a member of the defense bar I confront examples of it daily – in the courts, in the prisons and jails, in policing tactics, and in the media’s coverage of crime. Addressing this shameful injustice is vital not just because criminal defense lawyers are constitutionally mandated guardians of liberty, but because it is one of the great unresolved civil rights challenges facing this country. As president of NACDL, I therefore take great pride in this association’s continual push to expose and eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in the nation’s criminal justice system.
Throughout the past year and a half, NACDL has pursued a concerted effort to address disparities in the criminal justice system. We have raised awareness of the problem while simultaneously providing activists and policy makers with the type of concrete proposals necessary to effect desirable change. The push began back in October 2012 when NACDL and the Foundation for Criminal Justice joined with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, and the New York County Lawyers’ Association to host three (very) full days of dialogue focused on eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system. Panels covered issues such as jury selection, pretrial incarceration, charging, plea bargains, diversion programs, and sentencing.
The wide-ranging discussions at the October 2012 conference served as the basis for the groundbreaking report released in July 2013, Criminal Justice in the 21st Century: Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Criminal Justice System, and a series of related articles in the July 2013 issue of The Champion. Just a few months have passed since the report’s release, but we are already seeing the impact of NACDL’s work. The report has been downloaded over 1,600 times from the association’s website and posted to more than a dozen other websites, including that of the Colorado Commission on Criminal & Juvenile Justice. And, to my great pleasure, in late November a bar association in Washington State contacted NACDL about using the jury selection section of the report in a training program. The full report and three podcasts featuring those involved in its creation are available online at https://www.nacdl.org/reports/eliminatedisparity/.
NACDL’s work did not stop with the report’s release. Just a few weeks ago, in early December, the same co-sponsoring organizations gathered in Washington, D.C., for a second conference. This time around participants focused on continuing to advance reform through action. A complete webcast of the conference is available in the racial disparities section of NACDL’s website. Additionally, a number of academic articles on race and the criminal justice system prepared for the second conference have been published in a supplement to the New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy.
What I find particularly exciting about these recent efforts is the diverse coalition behind them. We are not speaking alone as defense lawyers. The conferences and the report brought together a distinguished group of criminal justice experts from all corners of the profession: prosecutors and defense attorneys, judges and scholars, and community leaders and formerly incarcerated advocates. That these groups are unified in their recognition of the problem, and their determination to pursue innovative solutions, is truly promising. As we move forward, I encourage you to visit NACDL’s website and further immerse yourself in the association’s latest initiatives. The more we’re talking, the more we’re aware. The more we press others to join us in taking a stand against disparity, the more successful we will be in ensuring that as the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, America’s criminal justice system will not be left behind.
Jerry J. Cox is a sole practitioner based in Mount Vernon, Ky., where he has practiced criminal defense law for over 40 years. He is certified as a Criminal Specialist by the National Board of Trial Advocacy (NBTA), and he served on the NBTA Board of Examiners in 2004. He is a past president of the Kentucky Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a Life Member of NACDL. In 2002, the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy recognized his commitment to criminal defense by awarding him the Nelson Mandela Lifetime Achievement Award.
