Beasley Leaves Woke Mark on Courts: Creats Commission on Fairness and Equity as Parting Gift

RALEIGH – Outgoing Chief Justice Cheri Beasley couldn’t leave the state’s top judicial seat without creating some Woke institutions to carry on the Left’s agenda in the judiciary. This comes at the same time as Beasley makes a bevy of appointments, too.

Before Republican Paul Newby takes over as Chief Justice, Beasley has created the Commission on Fairness and Equity for the courts to carry on ‘doing the work’ to address ‘systemic racism’ that results in disparate outcomes for people of color in the judicial system.

Great.

From the N.C. Judicial Branch (emphasis added):

“Chief Justice Cheri Beasley announced today the creation of the Chief Justice’s Commission on Fairness and Equity. The commission, created by an order of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in October, is charged with making recommendations “to reduce and ultimately eliminate disparate treatment, impacts, and outcomes in the North Carolina judicial system.” The commission will be co-chaired by Associate Justice Michael Morgan of the Supreme Court and Judge Valerie Zachary of the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

“Generations of North Carolinians have devoted their lives to improving the administration of justice in our courts. The Commission on Fairness and Equity will continue that legacy through work that seeks to guarantee full civic participation in our society and eliminates disparate treatment and outcomes in our courts,” said Chief Justice Beasley. “Under the leadership of Justice Morgan and Judge Zachary, I am confident the commission will achieve those goals and continue to push our justice system forward.”

The Court’s order acknowledges inequalities in the judicial system “that stem from a history of deeply rooted discriminatory policies and practices and the ongoing role of implicit and explicit racial, gender, and other biases,” and issues a number of specific charges to be completed by the Commission in 2021 and 2022, including:

• • Recommendations to eliminate adverse consequences based solely on inability to pay a legal financial obligation;
  • Recommendations to ensure that no person is prevented from serving on a jury as a result of explicit or implicit bias;
  • Plans to fully implement the remaining recommendations of the Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice reports on Pretrial Justice, Improving Indigent Defense Services, and Criminal Case Management;
  • Creation of educational programming for court officials and personnel and the private bar to build cultural competency and understanding of systemic racism, implicit bias, disparate outcomes, the impacts of trauma and trauma informed practices, and procedural fairness;
  • Plans to collect and disseminate data on court performance, including criminal charging, case outcomes, case processing times, and racial and gender disparities;
  • Plans for eliminating racial and gender disparities in the administration of abuse, neglect, and dependency cases; and
  • Plans for obtaining and analyzing feedback from the public, jurors, litigants, witnesses, lawyers, victims, law enforcement, and system employees regarding the performance of the judicial system and system actors.

With the formation of the Commission, North Carolina’s Judicial Branch joins a majority of states with similar commissions charged with rooting out discriminatory treatment and outcomes in state courts. According to the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in Courts, at least 37 other states have such commissions, several of which have existed for more than 30 years.”

First, consider having had a ‘fairness and equity commission’ for 30 years and still believing it is systemic racism and implicit bias that results in the relevant disparate outcomes.

We digress. Here, it is the ‘equity’ we must focus on with the creation of this commission. The Woke concept of equity is necessarily reformative. ANY difference in outcomes, results, makeup, trends, is a result of racism (or sexism, at a close second). Note how many times this press release mentions the elimination of disparities as primary goals of the commission.

That means ANY disparity among race or gender will be viewed as an untenable result in need of fixing.

If the reality of individuals’ actions result in a disparities among racial groups of being arrested, jailed, and convicted of crimes; how, exactly, do you “fix” that?  Presumably, ‘Equity’ can only be achieved in this probable scenario by introducing special rules for certain races and genders to affect a lower rate for those groups.

Creating that body of Woke policy will be what the commission is focused on. In the branch of government perhaps most beholden to the Rule of Law, the parting gift from Chief Justice Beasley will be a commission to introduce the Rule of Race in the North Carolina judiciary, the consequence of which can only be a corruption of the judiciary’s honorable mission of impartially interpreting laws in imbuing it with a social engineering side mission informed by Woke Radicals.