The justice system is stacked against African-Americans.
Whites do better at getting charges dropped or reduced to lesser offenses.
On Wednesday, the Center for Equal Opportunity will release figures suggesting that black defendants actually do better than whites at beating criminal charges. Moreover, although the numbers are sketchy, big-city juries may be acquitting blacks at a higher rate than whites. The Washington-based center, best known for its president Linda Chavez, hired analyst Robert Lerner to assemble numbers from a U.S. Justice Dept. database of 56,000 felony cases filed in state courts in the nation's 75 largest cities in May 1992. The cities account for most of the nation's violent crime and an even bigger share of blacks' encounters with the criminal justice system. Black defendants, it turns out, were convicted at a higher rate than whites in only two of the fourteen federally designated felony categories.