Texas Judicial System Research Paper

The Texas judicial system has been called one of the most complex in the United States, if not the world. The state of Texas is one of the seven states that uses partisan elections to select judges. Judicial selection begins with partisan elections and significant amounts of money for campaigning in order to win the election or reelection. Partisan elections influence the electorate in a consistent party label for the voting process. Another problem that the Texas judicial system lacks is the minority of representation on the bench. Most of the judges in a court according to the Texas Politics Profiling Project states that the typical Texas judge is a white male in his mid or late 50’s. In recent years the state's judiciary has become more diverse than it once was. More than 83 percent of judges surveyed are non-Hispanic whites who, as of 2000 made up just over 52 percent of Texans. More than 72 percent are male, though just less than 50 percent of Texans are male. Only about 13 percent of judges are Latino and less than 2 percent are African American though these groups constitute 32 percent and almost 12 percent of the population respectively. …show more content…
One might think that simply because in a case you have a white male judge working the trial of a Hispanic and Caucasian the person with the same ethnicity as the judge will win. In some of today’s cases you have a lot of people and the media backing up this opinion. According to an article In a case in Texas the punishment was based off of the use of racial stereotypes, that stereotype being that he was a black man and there for African Americans are statistically more likely than whites to commit violent