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Alito: Good Old Boys' Judge
Jan. 15th, 2006 10:54 pm♠
One was a black man convicted of murder by an all-white jury sitting in a courtroom where local prosecutors had eliminated all African American jurors in five consecutive murder trials in the space of a year. Alito, dissenting from a verdict overturning the conviction, wrote that the makeup of the jury was no more significant than the fact that "Although only about 10 [percent] of the population is left-handed, left-handers have won five of the last six presidential elections."
Durbin asked why he had used an analogy that his fellow judges had called totally inappropriate and suggestive of a disregard of "the history of discrimination against prospective black jurors and black defendants."
Alito responded, "Well, the analogy . . . went to the issue of statistics and the use and misuse of statistics, and the fact that statistics can be quite misleading . . . that's what that was referring to. There's a whole -- statistics is a branch of mathematics, and there are ways to analyze statistics so that you draw sound conclusions from them and avoid erroneous conclusions from them."
-- David S. Broder for The Washington Post
In discussing the Alito hearing, Mr. Broder brings out a sense of what we can expect from the man and the new Supreme Court. The loss of that critical O'Connor swing vote for what Broder calls a perfect company man should make the next few years especially interesting, as we witness this decisive consolidation of Republican power.
( Broder column )
xXx
One was a black man convicted of murder by an all-white jury sitting in a courtroom where local prosecutors had eliminated all African American jurors in five consecutive murder trials in the space of a year. Alito, dissenting from a verdict overturning the conviction, wrote that the makeup of the jury was no more significant than the fact that "Although only about 10 [percent] of the population is left-handed, left-handers have won five of the last six presidential elections."
Durbin asked why he had used an analogy that his fellow judges had called totally inappropriate and suggestive of a disregard of "the history of discrimination against prospective black jurors and black defendants."
Alito responded, "Well, the analogy . . . went to the issue of statistics and the use and misuse of statistics, and the fact that statistics can be quite misleading . . . that's what that was referring to. There's a whole -- statistics is a branch of mathematics, and there are ways to analyze statistics so that you draw sound conclusions from them and avoid erroneous conclusions from them."
-- David S. Broder for The Washington Post
In discussing the Alito hearing, Mr. Broder brings out a sense of what we can expect from the man and the new Supreme Court. The loss of that critical O'Connor swing vote for what Broder calls a perfect company man should make the next few years especially interesting, as we witness this decisive consolidation of Republican power.
( Broder column )
