Chief Justice Patience Roggensack touts Wisconsin judges for their lack of racial bias.

Byline: USA Today Network

Daniel Bice

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

This may be news to the Black residents living in the 53206 ZIP code and other parts of Milwaukee with high incarceration rates.

But state Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack is praising Wisconsin judges for their lack of racial bias.

In an email to all circuit judges on "racial concerns," Roggensack said she has long been interested in whether judges were responsible for the large number of Black people who are behind bars. She then pointed the judges to a 2016 paper she wrote on "race and sentencing" and the work of the Supreme Court statistician, Michael Thompson, on "race and Wisconsin courts."

Roggensack ended the note by patting the judges on the back for their fairness:

"I have the utmost confidence in the Wisconsin judiciary. My research and that of Dr. Thompson have shown that my confidence in Wisconsin's judiciary is well placed. Wisconsin has judges who show repeated concerns for the challenges that those who come before Wisconsin courts face."

The email comes less than two weeks after liberals on the state Supreme Court and more than half of Wisconsin's appeals judges called for making the bench more diverse while acknowledging how implicit bias affects the legal system.

The 28 judges and justices some on the bench and some retired issued their letter amid a nationwide reckoning with racism and police brutality after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died when a white police officer in Minneapolis kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

One of the authors of that letter, Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet, was critical of Roggensack's email to Wisconsin's circuit judges.

"I'm disappointed that rather than suggesting we open our minds and hearts to the realities of Black Americans, and accepting the challenge in front of us, the chief seems to be suggesting the status quo is acceptable," Dallet said via email on Tuesday. "This moment demands a different vision of our call to duty."

Craig Mastantuono, a Milwaukee attorney who serves on Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' judicial selection committee, agreed.

Mastantuono, head of the Milwaukee chapter of the American Constitution Society, pointed to a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study in 2014 that showed Wisconsin led the nation by far in the percentage of working-age African American men that it put behind bars.

"At the moment when communities across our country are confronting racial inequities in our...