There are many aspects of the law that attempt to make a sure a jury or a judge is fair in handling legal matters. The Fifth and Fourteenth amendments provide that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The procedural due process aspect of this amendment requires that government decisions to deprive a person of life, liberty or property must be done fairly. The procedural due process law gives an accused person the chance to object to his accusation before a fair and neutral decision-making body. The Sixth amendment also guarantees rights for the Muslim defendants to a jury trial and to a public trial. Through our legal history, we have created legal methods and traditions to apply these freedoms in a court of law.
In our legal system, the two main sources of neutral
decision makers are juries and judges. The law has a way of ensuring that these bodies are neutral and unbiased in their decision-making. While it will be impossible to gain complete neutrality, the law provides mechanisms within which fairness can be maximized.
A judge who is biased towards a certain group of people, in this case Arab-Americans, can significantly determine the outcome of a legal proceeding. Unfortunately the law does not provide a similar method of judge selection as the voir dire process. However, there are safeguards within the system to ensure fairness in a judge. An attorney who realized that he or she has been assigned a biased judge can choose to remove that judge. Fairness can be achieved under another judge who possesses no bias or a lesser degree of bias against Muslims or Arab-Americans. J
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