Beyond the Bench: Law, Justice, and Communities Summit

Equal Justice

• A recent survey conducted for the National Center for State Courts found that only 32 percent of African Americans polled believe that state courts provide equal justice to all.¹
• State courts have worked diligently over the last 25 years to address issues of racial and ethnic fairness.²
• Despite these substantial efforts, public skepticism that racial and ethnic minorities receive consistently fair and equal treatment in American courts remains widespread.
• What explains the disconnect between the extensive work undertaken by state courts to ensure racial and ethnic fairness and lingering public perceptions of racial unfairness?
• At least one explanation may be found in an emerging body of research on implicit cognition.³

What is Implicit Bias (or Unconscious Bias)?

Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan L. Hecht

• Research shows that individuals develop implicit attitudes and stereotypes as a routine process of sorting and categorizing the vast amounts of sensory information they encounter on an ongoing basis.⁴
• Implicit, as opposed to explicit, attitudes and stereotypes operate automatically, without awareness, intent, or conscious control.
• Intuition can be accurate, but can also be a source of erroneous judgment.⁵
• People harbor a variety of invidious associations, including:
  • Male/Career and Female/Family; and
  • 80% of white adults more closely associate white with good and black with bad.⁶

Police Chief Art Acevedo, Houston Police Department (HPD)

Dr. Tony Evans, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas

• These associations influence individual judgments.
• Judges are committed to egalitarian norms in ways that can blunt the effect of these intuitive associations on judgment.
• Contemporary psychological research demonstrates that people possess two cognitive systems: an intuitive system and a deliberative system. In ordinary life, people must use both systems. The intuitive system is faster, and a bit less conscious. Knowing when to suppress intuition is essential to sound judgment.
• A new model called “intuitive-override” provides a more accurate account of judging and points to several reforms which the civil and criminal justice systems could implement to produce more just and accurate outcomes.⁷

Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman