Walter Dean Myers's Monster And All-White Male Stereotypes

In the novel Monster the main character is Steve and he is in court and jail for being accused of a murder and robbery. I believe that Steve is innocent in this particular case. The main reason why they are seeing Steve so differently is because he black. I agree with what Steve's defense attorney said which was “the jury already knew their opinion as soon as they saw him walk in.” They saw an African American troubled teen walk into the courtroom who looks like he knows something. In addition, in court they barely let Steve tell his side of the story. I think he had nothing to do with this robbery/murder. He seems like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Steve says to O’brien “ aren’t you are innocent till proven guilty.” Surprisingly

1. Monster is a novel written in a screenplay format with Steve’s journal entries mixed in throughout. Do you think this is an effective format for the book? Why or why not?

Although many believe that racism and segregation have declined over the years, The Washington Post notes, in a 2016 analysis, that black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers (Lowery). In the 1930s and 1950s, Tom Robinson, Emmett Till, and the nine Scottsboro boys were sentenced to death after facing an all-white jury for a crime they did not commit. In 1931, nine, young, unemployed, black men were falsely accused of raping two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. Their sentence to death after facing an all-white jury sparked rallies and parades, which successfully changed the unfair verdict of their trial. Similarly, a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till was unjustly murdered after allegedly whistling at a white store owner, Carolyn Bryant. A few days later, he was found in a nearby river, and his mother arranged for a public funeral to expose the racial prejudice her son faced in Mississippi. The perpetrators were acquitted of all charges when tried in front of an all white jury. In the Scottsboro incident, the Murder of Emmett Till, and To Kill a Mockingbird, innocent men were victims of the society’s racial prejudice and convicted of crimes they did not commit.

Can racial bias have an effect on the verdict of being guilty or innocent? The American judicial courtroom has been comprised of the nation’s many greatest racial discriminatory cases over the past century, but the most racially upstanding case, when referring to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird includes The Scottsboro Trials. Both stories uprise in the 1930s, displaying a white supremacist mindset, which two cases fall into the conviction of rape. The Scottsboro case started on a train to northern Alabama to southern Tennessee, when nine African American boys, ranging in ages from 13-19, allegedly raped two “innocent” Caucasian women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. Racial discrimination uprises in American judicial system when shown in To Kill a Mockingbird and The Scottsboro Trials through the racial prejudice within the jury in the courtroom, easy accessibility to target African Americans, biased accusations, as well as the social pressure to serve in one’s defense.

It is not hard to know that everyone has different morals/justice and ideals about their views on life. That said, it is also not hard to know that these morals can also be easily manipulated and exploited or influenced by external ideas. An example of this would be the “All-White Jury” that were commonly practiced in the 1800’s. Now if you look back on the verdicts of Black men who were being trialed by a “All-White Jury”, it’d always usually ended up as them being guilty. An example to back my argument up is the case of the George Stinney, a 14 year old boy who was trialed for the murder of two pre-teen girls. George was then later convicted guilty and was charged with death. He was then sent to the electric

When thinking of a jury, there is a belief that everyone is fair when it comes to making the decision of whether the person being accused of the crime is guilty or not guilty because of the person’s race. What if this belief is not necessarily correct? There have been many instances in whether race has been a factor when the jury makes a decision. According to Baskin, Goldstein, and Sommers (2014), there has been enough evidence to show that racial biases influences the decisions of a jury. In this paper, the articles will show how jury decision-making is influenced by the offender’s race.

In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the jury in the Tom Robinson trial had to make a decision. Tom Robinson who was an innocent man, was convicted for a crime he did not do. Atticus proves his innocence with hard facts and it was up to the jury if they wanted to deem Tom Robinson guilty or not guilty. The jury thought about the case for a long time which does not happen often with cases about a black man in the 1930's, but in the end they did deem him guilty. Even though that they knew that he was an innocent man, they proclaimed that he was guilty, because they had to make a decision, and they decided to do what society thought was right. When Tom Robinson knew that there would be nothing that could save him he decided to run, not because he was guilty but because he knew that he would die either

Monster is an example of what Patty Campbell would call a “landmark book.” Texts such as these “encourage readers to interact with the text and with one another by employing a variety of devices, among them ambiguity” (Campbell 1) Because it is told through the eyes of Steve himself, the plot can be difficult to decipher. It is ambiguous whether he is innocent or guilty of being involved with the crime. Steve learned to make things unpredictable from his film teacher Mr. Sawicki who teaches him, “If you make your film predictable, they’ll make up their minds about it long before it’s over” (19). Steve took his teacher’s advice and made this film script entirely unpredictable,

African American men born in the United States in 2001 have a one in three chance of being incarcerated at some point in their lifetime, according to Department of Justice statistics. An even greater number will have a criminal record and face the host of collateral consequences that emanate from a criminal record. As Michelle Alexander wrote, “An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were.”, as gathered

The Scottsboro boys were nine African American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama during the year 1931. No crime in American history that never occurred has produced as many trials, convictions, and retrials as the alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers did. This tragedy marks a time in the United States where African Americans were not receiving the right to a fair trial and encountering racism because of their skin color. This court case is seen as one of the major examples that one innocent person or in this case many innocent people have been convicted and punished for a crime they did not commit.

Everyday, people are arrested for crimes they have committed. However, the justice system, in some cases, has failed to convict and arrest the right person. Innocent people have been sent to jail based upon the deliberate misidentification of suspects. Throughout U.S history, there have been several famous wrongful convictions such as the Scottsboro Boys and Ed Johnson (Grimsley). Their convictions were based on race due to the racial strife from the Jim Crow era. Base on David Love’s article, many convictions after the Jim Crow era were still being caused by misleading identification from eyewitness claims of the suspects being African Americans. Due to the advancement of forensic and DNA technology, lack of evidence from previous convictions

In both the case of Tom Robinson and the real life version of the Scottsboro boys, we see that justice is denied to African Americans because the jury consists of only white. The day of the Scottsboro trial, when the jury was discussing the final verdict, the sheriff had a talk with the doctor who examined the girls and the jury didn’t do much investigation. Klarman states, “It later came out that Sheriff Wann had warned Norris that he would be killed if he did not admit that the girls had been raped”(Klarman 160). This quote demonstrates that the trial wasn’t the best since it later came out that the doctor lied which meant that the jury didn’t do much to investigate. This shows that the jury didn’t want the boys to win the trial

serves as another major contributor to the racial lopsidedness which pervades the prison industrial complex. Alexander states that racial biases on juries has historic roots in slavery, “until 1860, no black person had ever sat on a jury in the United States. During the Reconstruction era, African Americans began to serve on juries in the South for the first time.” (Alexander, 117) Alexander contends that the lack of diversity on juries lead to countless miscarriages of justice against African-Americans. An example of this would be the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in which nine African-American teenagers were accused of rape by two white women. The teenagers were swiftly sentenced to death by an all-white jury even though one of the girls

When a black man/woman is brought to court, the criminal justice system turns into a nasty and corrupt system that works to ruin the lives of minorities. This is a progressed notion from when black men were first freed from slavery. African slaves did not have any rights and thus were not protected or favoured by judges and juries. Consequently, this resulted in black men, especially, being repeatedly accused of crimes they did not commit, such as raping women who claim this to get out of trouble themselves. Consequently, black men/women go to jail or are condemned for a crime they haven’t commit and men who aren’t black get away for a nasty crime, if they harm a black individual. Evidently, it is certain that the criminal justice system

In my research, I have found that there have been many recent cases where people have been accused of something they did not do due to their race. I have found that on PBS it states, “The system is not fair. Institutional racism is alive and well in the juvenile justice system, as it is in the criminal justice system. It's easier to identify with people that are more like yourself, so if you have judges that are predominantly from that same community, they can identify. . . . The same thing happens with people who have money versus people who don't have money--if they can demonstrate a support system that can act as a safety net or think they can act as a safety net for them on the outside, judges are more prone to buy into that.” I have also looked at some other sources that give proof that criminal justice biases still exist such as an article titled “Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist,” which states, “At a presidential primary debate in 2008, Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences ... for the same crime.” My final source comes from an article titled “Justice News,” from the Attorney General Holder which states that, “A recent study reported that half of African-American men have been arrested at least once by age