Bias CLE 599 to 1
Sunday, February 22, 2004
WHAT JENNIFER LECTURED ABOUT
Clarion Legal presented an Elimination of Bias CLE this past Thursday entitled "What Jennifer Saw." The title is from a PBS Frontline program about the wrongful conviction of Ronald Cotton for the rape of Jennifer Thompson.
The Cotton case raises some interesting issues about eyewitness identification, as well as race. It is unclear whether evidence of Cotton's prior conviction for assault with intent to rape was admitted in either of his two trials. Amendments to federal and state rules of evidence in the past decade have made it easier to admit such evidence of prior crimes. Although liberals and conservatives generally agree that this is a positive development in the rules of evidence, it would have operated to the detriment of an innocent person in this particular case.
This important, difficult, and emotional case also happens to illustrate a paradox in the debate about bias in the legal system. Some people may argue that efforts to address purported prejudice against women by amending the rules of evidence have an unintended effect. They would argue that the unintended effect is to increase overall conviction rates in an area where there is already a racial disparity, thus increasing the overall racial disparity.
None of this is to minimize the importance of pursuing convictions for rape, or pursuing exoneration for the innocent. But it does point out that reasonable people can disagree about the existence, extent and remedies for bias, as well as who the victims are. This particular CLE seminar demonstrates even a prescribed liberal ideology leads to disagreement.
This seminar also demonstrates how difficult it is to define the parameters of the rule just by looking at a list of courses that were approved. There is a paragraph about the seminar in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue of The Clarion, but race is not even mentioned. One can guess at the content of this particular seminar because there is an entire Frontline documentary about the case. However, this is not true of most other seminars. The CLE Board requires course sponsors to provide a narrative explaining how the seminar meets the rule, but the CLE Board does not retain these narrative explanations. The alleged ideological variety (600 different ones) is worthless because there is no way to pick out the alleged conservative options, nevermind non-ideological courses.
The founder of Clarion Legal, Jennifer Kramer, is also a board member of the Innocence Project of Minnesota. The mission of the Innocence project is to investigate claims of actual innocence and promote DNA testing on those claims. When contacted on an earlier date, Ms. Kramer was coy about whether she supports allowing different ideologies, or even substantive law courses, to receive bias credit.
