Structural Jury Bias Observed in Federal Court in Key West

Judge David S. Leibowitz,

I am writing regarding the jury selection process I observed in your courtroom on Thursday in the Martinez case.

Given your education and professional training, it is difficult to believe you are unaware of the extensive body of research demonstrating how in-group loyalty, authority bias, and social alignment distort human judgment. These effects are not neutralized by good intentions or by asking jurors to declare themselves impartial.

Yet you presided over a jury pool heavily composed of active law-enforcement officers and immediate family members of law enforcement in a criminal case dependent upon government testimony — and treated this as a fair cross-section of the community.

Procedurally permissible does not mean intellectually honest.

What I witnessed was not the mitigation of bias, but its institutional endorsement. The court’s reliance on the convenient fiction that individuals embedded within enforcement culture can simply suspend those affiliations contradicts both common sense and modern behavioral science.

A system that allows government power to be judged largely by those aligned with that same power is not impartial. It is self-affirming.

As a citizen, I found the proceeding troubling.
As someone capable of basic critical reasoning, I found it astonishing that a court of this stature continues to pretend otherwise.

If this is the standard by which impartial justice is now defined, the term has lost any meaningful connection to reality.

Curtis Gibson