Fair Trial
Is It a Fair Trial When the Jury Doesn’t Look Like You?
I keep thinking about Metcalf. About what it means to get a “fair trial” when no Black people served on that jury.
The Sixth Amendment says you get an impartial jury of your peers. But who are your peers when the whole box is white? When the defendant is Black, the victim is white, and the history between us is blood on the courtroom floor?
Tensions are brewing. You can feel it. Every time a case like Metcalf’s surfaces, it’s not just about that one man. It’s about every Black body that’s sat at the defense table looking out at faces that don’t look like mama, don’t look like uncle, don’t look like anybody from the block.
And I was wondering — now that we have a white president like Trump — when cases like this would surface. Because they always do. Different decade, same question: Can we get justice in rooms we were never meant to enter?
Have we progressed?
We’ve got Black judges, Black lawyers, Black DAs. We’ve got cameras in the courtroom and hashtags outside it. But when the jury pool gets pulled from counties that are 90% white, when prosecutors strike Black jurors for “looking bored” or “having relatives in the system,” are we really that far from 1955?
“Fair” isn’t just about evidence. It’s about who gets to weigh it. It’s about whether the people deciding your life understand the weight of being Black in America.
I’m not saying Metcalf is innocent or guilty. I wasn’t in the room. But I am saying a trial without any Black jurors in a racially charged case doesn’t feel fair. It feels like math that doesn’t add up. It feels like progress that keeps circling back.
Trump didn’t create this. But his presidency pulled the sheet off. Made people bold again. Made “law and order” mean one thing in the suburbs. So now these cases surface with the volume turned up.
Have we progressed?
We’ve progressed enough to ask the question out loud. We’ve progressed enough that I can write this and not get fired. We haven’t progressed enough that a jury of all white people in a case like this doesn’t make Black folks hold their breath.
Fairness isn’t a verdict. It’s a process. And when the process excludes us, the verdict feels empty — no matter what it is.
Until a jury of peers actually means peers, we haven’t arrived.
We’re still walking. Still testifying. Still praying that one day, justice won’t need an all-white translation.
*Cathrynmharris
