women to fi ll 39 of 86


Obama has selected


22


circuit judge positions


brother was sentenced under mandatory-minimum laws as part of a government drug sting. After attending the proceedings and witnessing the trial judge “behave badly,” Vázquez says she began to understand the dangers of hege- mony in the courts and set out to restore a sense of fairness in her home state, which has large minority, particularly Native American, communities. “During one of my fi rst jury trials, there was a black man


who had been accused of robbing a bank,” she recalls. “He was coming in for his jury selection, and when he walked in with his lawyer, he saw that there was not one black person on the jury. He told his lawyer that he wanted to take a plea, and I was just devastated. It really bothered me that regardless of how the jury selection would have turned out, regardless of the case his lawyer would have conducted, he was convinced that he wouldn’t get a fair trial based on the appearance of the legal system. “T at should be important to all of us, to all judges and


all lawyers,” Vázquez says. “T e perception alone condemns us. And in New Mexico, I have had Native American


DIVERSITY & THE BAR® JULY/AUGUST 2011


victims come in and say, ‘You don’t care about Native American life.’ We have to be careful that our legal system is fundamentally fair and that it appears fair. T e day people mock us, or mumble under their breaths, or question how we got our jobs, is when we should be concerned about how we’re perceived. We have to protect the integrity of the law and that’s why diversity is important. We all grow up diff erently with diff erent burdens that make us sensitive to what other people go through.” In fact, professional organizations, such as the American


Bar Association and the National Association of Women Judges, have long argued that female jurists help improve the quality of the bench because they bring a diff erent understanding of how the legal system aff ects those in mar- ginalized communities, particularly women, girls, and fami- lies of color. And while a study of more than 7,000 decisions shows that men and women do not judge diff erently, except in sex discrimination cases, fi nding female jurists who could provide diversity in thought was the motivating factor for the judge who recruited Teresa Guerra Snelson.4


MCCA.COM district and


President


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