Discrimination is unjust

I begin by saying that if a person can hide his racism long enough to be brought into a jury trial, the right to a free trial has in fact corrupted itself. As I have said, it is an institutional problem. That is, if the justice system (through peremptory challenges and voir dire) cannot in the first place guarantee the right to a free trial, we cannot say that anyone is entitled to that right. The existence of a free trial presupposes the ability of the institution to provide impartiality. Guaranteeing a right (in the Constitution) and giving a right (holding a free trial) are two very separate things. My point being that merely because a jury has failed to be impartial (and has engaged in some degree of discrimination) does not mean the jury is, by itself, responsible for an unjust guilty verdict, as my opponent claims. It is true that an impartial jury is part of the defendant's right to a fair trial; however, it is not the responsibility of the jury to ensure impartiality. A jury is simply an instrument. It is the responsibility of the artisan to use that instrument properly, and to fix it if it is defective. My opponent has misunderstood the difference between malice racism leading to a discriminatory disposition and ignorance with respect to racial divides. A person's ignorance does not undermine the right to a fair trial any more than my ignorance of how to work an automobile undermines another's right to work his own automobile. The point is that ignorance can very well change the outcome of the trial. Ignorance can both be caused by racism, as well as be itself the cause of racism. If it is ignorance that causes racism, we cannot reasonably expect ignorant jurors to suddenly become enlightened with respect to their views on race. Juries are drawn by chance, through a cross-section of the population. In the perfect world, all jurors will be unbiased scholars of the law. However, this is not the case, and this is one of the inherent weaknesses of the jury system that have to be accommodated. Most examples of racism are examples of ignorance on the part of people with respect to others of other races. When these ignorant people become acquainted with people of other races, their views change[1]. I disagree with my opponent: it matters a great deal what a person's motivations are. If a person is racist to the core and ignorant as a result, that person will seek to destroy the accused just out of hatred. If a person is ignorant, and racist as a result, that person will unwittingly see the accused differently from oneself, and be subtly and irrationally pushed to either direction. As I said, to expect a person to completely push biases out of his mind for a trial is an unrealistic expectation, and one that must be taken up against the system, not ignoramuses given the power by that system to decide the fate of someone else. My opponent takes the existence of discrimination as a cause of failure in the trial-by-jury system. However, this is avoiding the fact that the trial-by-jury system allows the effects of discrimination to be felt on the accused, which is a more fundamental issue than individual prejudices. The failure of the trial-by-jury system is not sewn from discriminatory practices; rather, the trial-by-jury system fails because it does not institutionally live up to my opponent's standards for a fair trial. As I have said, if the government cannot actually guarantee a right, my opponent has no place to still claim that citizens are entitled to it. For example, when the social security system is bankrupt in 2017, even though the government guaranteed me the right to social security benefits, there is no sense in which I will actually be entitled to nonexistent social security benefits. My opponent believes that I have not adequately addressed the right to a free trial, which is supposedly guaranteed to all Americans. However, if the right is not actually one's to keep (if my opponent is correct in that a free trial, in many cases, is not possible), there is no right to a free trial, and my opponent has undermined his own argument. I, on the other hand, believe that my opponent has not addressed my own claims, which he dismisses as a "speech" not worthy of any thought. I beg to differ, and in this second round, I have connected the thesis of my "speech" to my opponent's prized example of the right to a free trial (namely, in how that example alone utterly fails to affirm the resolution). If every right necessitates the existence of a subject and an object, in the case of a right to a free trial, there is no object if the government is unable to procure a free trial (since it is a government-guaranteed right). More concretely, it is like person A trading 10 apples to person B for 10 oranges; however, if there are no actual apples or oranges, no one really has a right to anything real. My opponent believes that a jury's incompetence interferes with a fair trial more than the incompetence of the government and legal counsels entrusted with supplying that free trial. Nevertheless, this ignores the fact that, much like the structure of the government, there is a check-and-balance system[2]: the jury decides the case so that there is disinterested consideration of the evidence, and the counsels/courts check the jury's power by making sure the jury is disinterested. It is not the responsibility of the jury to check itself, or throw out its own racists. It is the responsibility of the court to ensure partiality, and thus the penetration of discriminatory dispositions into the court is the fault of the jury system itself, not the jurors who are but instruments to justice. If what my opponent says is true, the supposed right to a free trial means nothing with respect to the resolution. ----------------- [1] = http://www.helium.com... [2] = http://papers.ssrn.com...