A two-year Dallas Morning News inves­ti­ga­tion of jury selec­tion in Dallas County has revealed that pros­e­cu­tors exclude blacks from juries at more than twice the rate they reject whites, and that race is the most impor­tant per­son­al trait affect­ing which jurors pros­e­cu­tors reject. The paper’s review also found that when poten­tial black and white jurors answered key ques­tions about crim­i­nal jus­tice issues the same way, blacks were reject­ed at a high­er rate.

The study exam­ined 108 (non-death penal­ty) felony cas­es tried in 2002. Among the find­ings revealed by the study were the following:

  • Prosecutors reject­ed 79% of blacks who favored reha­bil­i­ta­tion over pun­ish­ment or deter­ence, but only 55% of the whites who gave the same answer.

  • Prosecutors exclud­ed 78% of the blacks who acknowl­edged that they or some­one close to them had had con­tact with the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, com­pared with only 39% of whites.

  • Prosecutors reject­ed every black who said they or some­one close to them had had a bad expe­ri­ence with police or the courts, com­pared with 39% of whites.

  • Defense attor­neys exclud­ed white jurors at three times the rate they rejected blacks.

Texas District Judge Henry Wade Jr., whose father’s office was cit­ed repeat­ed­ly for race bias in jury selec­tion, said, ​“I think infor­mal­ly pros­e­cu­tors talk and say, you know, ​‘What can we do to get minori­ties off the jury pan­el?’ ” Wade added that when pros­e­cu­tors ask jurors whether pun­ish­ment, deter­rence or reha­bil­i­ta­tion is the main pur­pose of sen­tenc­ing, the ques­tion is cal­cu­lat­ed to try to get blacks off juries. ​“That’s just a taught ques­tion. A lot of minori­ties are going to say reha­bil­i­ta­tion, so you strike every­body who says reha­bil­i­ta­tion and you’re cov­ered under Batson. I think that’s the only rea­son they ask it,” stat­ed Wade. (In Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the U.S. Supreme Court held that strik­ing jurors on the basis of race was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.) In the past six years, none of the thou­sands of cas­es brought to tri­al in the County has been reversed by Texas courts on a Batson chal­lenge.

(Dallas Morning News, August 21, 2005; part 1 of a 3‑part series). See Race and DPIC’s page on Thomas Miller-El, a case in which the Supreme Court found racial bias in jury selec­tion in Dallas.

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