Study Shows Prosecutors Are More Likely To Exclude Blacks From Juries

Study Shows Prosecutors Are More Likely To Exclude Blacks From Juries

The judicial system doesn’t understand the meaning of Black Lives Matter according to a new article from The New York Times.

In 2010, the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm, studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — and found the problem to be rampant.

For example, from 2005 to 2009, prosecutors in Houston County, Ala., struck 80 percent of qualified black jurors from death penalty cases. Consequently, in a county that’s 27 percent black, half of death penalty juries were all-white. The other half had one black citizen each.

Another study of death penalty trials in North Carolina shows that from 1990 to 2010, prosecutors excluded black jurors over twice as often as nonblack jurors.

An analysis of over 300 felony jury trials in Caddo Parish, La., from 2003 to 2012 found that of 8,318 qualified jurors, nearly half of black jurors were struck, compared with only 15 percent of nonblack jurors.

In at least six different ways, the prosecutors singled out eligible black jurors: Notes from the jury selection list show they marked their names with a “B” and highlighted them in green on four separate copies; circled the word “black” on their juror questionnaires; noted several as “B #1,” “B #2”; ranked potential black jurors against one another “in case it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors”; and wrote “Definite NOs” on the list of priority strikes, which had all four possible black jurors.

Prosecutors have been known for excluding Blacks from their jury pool to gain a desirable decision…

When the prosecutors asked a white juror and a black juror whether the defendant’s age, which was close to that of their children, would be a factor in the sentence, the black juror said “none whatsoever” but was struck based on his son’s age. The white juror answered “probably so” and was accepted.

Along with other former prosecutors, I joined a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Mr. Foster. We recognize, and refuse to condone, the blatant unconstitutionality of the prosecutorial misconduct in this case. Moreover, my own experience suggests that discrimination in jury selection is indeed a national problem, despite over a century of attempted legislative and judicial remedies.

Discuss.