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Statistical evidence can prove racial profiling, but here it did not

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Statistic evidence is admissible to show profiling, but here the evidence did not prove it. The officer has a presumption of regularity attending his actions. Commonwealth v. Lora, 2008 Mass. LEXIS 252 (May 20, 2008): An assessment of the evidence admitted at the rehearing on Lora's motion to suppress leads us to the inescapable conclusion that the use of census benchmarking to compare the demographics of a small community with citation ratios on a major interstate highway, which happens to pass through it, is unreliable and not accepted in the scientific community. Such benchmarking data do not provide an adequate basis for assessing the racial composition of the drivers encountered by Shugrue on Route 290 and is inadequate to establish that similarly situated drivers of different races were treated differently...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on May 21, 2008 (boomark / email).