An arti­cle in the most recent issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review exam­ines the prac­tice of exclud­ing African-Americans from jury ser­vice, par­tic­u­lar­ly in death penal­ty cas­es in North Carolina. In Bias in the Box, Dax-Devlon Ross notes, ​“Alongside the right to vote, the right to serve on a jury is an endur­ing pil­lar of our democracy.…Nevertheless, there is per­haps no are­na of pub­lic life where racial bias has been as broad­ly over­looked or casu­al­ly tol­er­at­ed as jury exclu­sion.” Ross traces the his­to­ry of civ­il rights lit­i­ga­tion that secured blacks the right to par­tic­i­pate in juries, but he also shows the con­tin­ued use of strate­gies to remove them from ser­vice. In par­tic­u­lar, the repeal of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act in 2013 removed an impor­tant pro­tec­tion of equal­i­ty in jury ser­vice. Before the act was rescind­ed, a spe­cial court reduced the sen­tences of four death row inmates because of pat­terns of racial bias in jury selec­tion. In one case, a pros­e­cu­tor’s notes described poten­tial jurors as ​“blk wino — drugs” and as liv­ing in a ​“blk, high drug” neigh­bor­hood. Ross quotes a num­ber of poten­tial black jurors who want­ed to serve in North Carolina but felt they were exclud­ed because of their race.

The arti­cle also recounts the case of Darryl Hunt, a black man who was exon­er­at­ed through DNA evi­dence in 2003 after spend­ing near­ly 20 years in prison for a rape and mur­der. His tri­al took place in Winston-Salem, whose pop­u­la­tion is about 35% black. However, of the 60 jurors and alter­nates select­ed in Hunt’s four tri­als, only one was black.

(D. Ross, ​“Bias in the Box,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2014; DPIC post­ed Oct. 2, 2014). See Race and Arbitrariness.

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