They were all trying to get home -- Oscar Grant in Oakland, Trayvon Martin in Florida, or the woman who was raped in a bus in New Delhi and christened Nirbhaya or the fearless one by the media, or the woman gangraped on her way back from college in Kamdhuni near Kolkata. They didn't want to spark off great protests. They didn't want to become symbols, placards or posters. They didn't want docudramas made about their lives.

A jury in Florida failed us. We have not seen a moral failure this grave since a similarly all-white jury in Simi Valley, Calif., in 1992 acquitted the four LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. Writing in the same year as that ill-fated verdict, the distinguished civil rights lawyer Derrick Bell declared that "racism is an integral, permanent and indestructible component of this society." In most circumstances, I treat this declaration as a foil: a claim to be slowly picked apart as, at best, too easy and, at worst, deeply unfair and wrong. Not today.

The issue then boils down to whether the Zimmerman jurors can separate his defense attorney’s deliberate muddle of the facts and trashing of Martin and see that there’s absolutely no credible proof that marijuana use in and of itself induces violent behavior in anyone. There is not a scintilla of evidence that Martin was inherently aggressive and violence prone. The prosecution’s job is to make sure that they see this. 

Although clearly not barred from providing testimony in the Trayvon Martin case, it seems that many in the public sought to hold Rachel Jeantel to the same “racialized” standard. While the ridicule and mockery cut across racial lines, it is hard to believe that critics would shower such harsh treatment on a white witness of similar speech and disposition. While her language and demeanor may not have been palatable to some, neither should impugn either her credibility or integrity as a witness. 

The speculation has been nonstop over whether an all-female jury is a good or bad thing for accused Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman. There is no consensus on this. But the view of women jurors in major case trials is rife with myths, stereotypes, and preconceptions. Researchers have found that in the decades before and even after the Supreme Court ruling in 1979 that knocked out biased exclusions of jurors based on gender, there’s still the deeply embedded notion that women jurors are different than men in that they are more easily swayed by emotions.