Trial by prejudice?

In recent months bouncers involved in two separate incidents have been cleared by two separate juries of the murder of Suleiman Abubaker and the attempted murder of Felix Idisi Oduh.

The verdict of the court has to be respected and for all intents and purposes the accused have been cleared of committing these crimes. But this should not preclude us from raising questions on whether "all white" juries are best suited to determine guilt and innocence in a society which is so prone to racial prejudice and anti immigrant sentiments.

It is worth remembering that Suleiman Abubaker was referred to as "l-iswed" (the black one) during court proceedings. And strangely the prosecution did not even object to these remarks.

The problem of racial prejudice clouding the judgement of juries is not particular to Malta. The US justice system is plagued by racist juries. In March a study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics entitled 'The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials' showed that all white juries in Florida are more likely to convict black peoples.

In cases with no blacks in the jury pool, black defendants were convicted at an 81% rate and white defendants at a 66% rate. When the jury pool included at least one black member, conviction rates were almost identical: 71% for black defendants and 73% for whites.

But all studies show the same pattern. A similar study published in the UK in 2010 concluded that all-white and mixed race juries acquit ethnic minority defendants at roughly the same rate.

But Malta is far less ethnically diverse than the UK. Most Maltese people do not have any meaningful relations with the immigrant population, which still lives in the margins of society. An inhumane detention policy is deliberately used to segregate immigrants from the rest of society.

In this sense Malta is more similar to Alabama before the advent of the civil rights movement than to either the USA or the UK. In this sense the risks posed by all white juries in Malta can be even greater.

Let's not forget that one of the reasons the jury system was introduced was that of ensuring that magistrates did not favour fellow aristocrats in cases involving commoners.

In cases involving assault against immigrants, it is clear that while the accused is being judged by his or her "peers" it is not clear whether the victim is being offered justice by his or her "peers".

One way of addressing the problem is to ensure more ethnically diverse juries. But since this could be difficult to achieve in the short term, it could make more sense to defer racially motivated cases to a panel composed of different judges.