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posted by on Sunday March 12 2017, @11:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the statistics dept.

[In 2013] about 10% of the population over 12 years of age had used illegal drugs in the previous year, and that this use was more or less evenly distributed across the largest racial groups: 8.8% for Hispanics, 9.5% for whites and 10.5% percent for African Americans.

Convictions for drug crimes are another matter entirely. Thirty-three percent of those serving prison terms for drug offenses are African Americans, two-and-a-half times their proportion in the population. [...] Overall African Americans are about five times as likely to go to prison for drug possession as whites, and judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about 12 times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes than innocent white people.

[...] Sixty percent of the drug exonerations we know about occurred in Harris County, Texas, home to Houston (133/221). The defendants in these cases pled guilty to drug possession before the supposed drugs they possessed were tested in a crime lab, and were exonerated weeks, months or years later after testing was done and no illegal drugs were found. Why did these defendants plead guilty even though they possessed no controlled substances? Some may have had powders or pills that they thought contained illegal drugs but did not. As far as we can tell, however, most pled guilty to get out of jail.

[...] Most, if not all of these innocent black defendants in Harris County pled guilty rather than go to trial because it was their best option, given that they had been arrested and charged, and were held in jail. But why were so many innocent black defendants arrested for drug possession when there is no reason to believe that African Americans are more likely than whites to use illegal drugs?

Two-thirds of the arrests in the Harris County guilty-plea exoneration cases (89/133) were based on cheap and notoriously inaccurate "presumptive" field tests for drugs, usually on substances found in searches following traffic stops. Anybody who is subjected to that process is at risk of false arrest and conviction. Across the country, African Americans drivers are about as likely to be stopped as white drivers, but after that, they are three times as likely to be searched. As a result, they bear much of the brunt of drug-law enforcement—including false drug possession convictions, which may number in the thousands if not tens of thousands a year.

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @05:44PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @05:44PM (#478117)

    tells me that blacks are far more likely to act afraid.

    Uh no. It tells you that police have so much less respect for black people that they push them much harder to search their vehicles.
    White guy gets pulled over for a broken tail-light "here's a fixit ticket sir, if you come to court with a receipt for the new bulb you won't have to pay it, have a good day!"
    Black guy gets pulled over for a broken tail-light "if you don't let me search your car, we are going to impound it for a vehicle code violation."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @09:31PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @09:31PM (#478208)
    Or it's that most blacks tend to mouth off to EVERYONE.
    And i don't recall white folks shot because they tried to grab the cops gun either....
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @09:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @09:40PM (#478212)

      And i don't recall white folks shot because they tried to grab the cops gun either....

      That's because when a white guy tries to grab a cop's gun, he gets arrested.