PUNE: Senior US attorney Fred Rooney said that there was shocking racial bias in the United States and called for a project on providing free legal aid to those deprived of access to justice system. “It is an undeniable truth that racial discrimination in the US judicial system is shocking and blacks are seven times more likely than whites to be incarcerated,” Rooney said.
Speaking at a function at Symbiosis Law School here on Wednesday, Rooney said that the US may consider itself as the guardian of human rights around the world, but its own record in terms of rights violation is abysmal and go largely unreported.
“Increasing violent crimes in the Untied States pose a serious threat to its people’s lives, liberty and security. In the US, about 30,000 people die of gun wounds every year. The USA Today reported on Dec. 5, 2007, that gun killings have climbed 13 percent overall since 2002.
“Cases in which the US law enforcement authorities allegedly violated victims’ civil rights increased by 25 percent from year 2001 to 2007 over the previous seven years, according to statistics from US Department of Justice. However, the majority of law enforcement officers accused of brutality were not prosecuted in the end,” said Rooney, director of Community Legal Resource Network, the legal aid arm of the City University of New York School of Law.
According to Rooney, US has the world’s highest prison-inmates ratio in the world. A Dec. 5, 2007, report by EFE news agency has quoted statistics of US Department of Justice as saying that the number of inmates in US prisons increased by 500 percent over the last 30 years.
“Poor population in the US is constantly increasing. As per the figures released by the US Census Bureau in August 2007, the official poverty rate in 2006 was 12.3 percent. There were 36.5 million people, or 7.7 million families living in poverty in 2006. Almost one out of eight US citizens live in poverty,” Rooney said.
“About 11 million people lived in very low food security, according to Reuters. Racial discrimination is a deep-rooted social illness in the US with Black people and other minor ethnic groups live in the bottom of the society,” Rooney said.
Racial discrimination in the US judicial system is shocking. According to the 2007 annual report on the state of black Americans issued by the National Urban League, African-Americans (especially males) are more likely than whites to be convicted and sentenced to longer terms.
