A recent study pub­lished by the Equal Justice Initiative, a non­prof­it human rights and legal ser­vices orga­ni­za­tion in Alabama, shows that the prac­tice of exclud­ing blacks and oth­er racial minori­ties from juries remains wide­spread and large­ly unchecked, espe­cial­ly in the South. The study, ​“Illegal Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection: A Continuing Legacy,” found that in Alabama, courts have found racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry jury selec­tion in 25 death penal­ty cas­es since 1987, and in some coun­ties, 75% of black jury pool mem­bers have been struck in cap­i­tal cas­es. In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, an analy­sis by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center found that blacks were struck from juries more than three times as often as whites between 1999 and 2007. In North Carolina, at least 26 cur­rent death row inmates were sen­tenced by all-white juries. According to Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, ​“There’s just this tol­er­ance, there’s indif­fer­ence to exclud­ing peo­ple on the basis of race, and pros­e­cu­tors are doing it with impuni­ty. Unless you’re in the court­room, unless you’re a lawyer work­ing on these issues, you’re not going to know whether your local pros­e­cu­tor con­sis­tent­ly bars peo­ple of color.”

In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Batson v. Kentucky that if a pat­tern of dis­crim­i­na­tion emerged dur­ing jury selec­tion, lawyers must pro­vide non-racial rea­sons for their strikes. However, in a lat­er case, the Court ruled that the rea­sons do not have to be ​“per­sua­sive, or even plau­si­ble.” The lat­ter case involved a pros­e­cu­tor who dis­missed one black juror with the expla­na­tion that he had long hair and anoth­er because he had a goatee.

Studies show that racial­ly diverse juries delib­er­ate longer, con­sid­er a wider vari­ety of per­spec­tives and make less fac­tu­al errors than an all-white jury. Predominantly black juries are less like­ly to impose the death penal­ty. The Equal Justice Initiative study not­ed that, ​“jury diver­si­ty is espe­cial­ly crit­i­cal because the oth­er deci­sion-mak­ing roles in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem are held most­ly by peo­ple who are white.” In the eight Southern states exam­ined by the study, more than 93% of the dis­trict attor­neys were white. In two states, all of the dis­trict attor­neys were white.

(S. Dewan, ​“Blacks Still Being Blocked from Juries in the South, Study Finds,” New York Times, June 2, 2010). See Studies, Arbitrariness, and Race. Read the entire EJI Study. View a video about the study. See also DPIC​’s report, ​“A Crisis of Confidence,” reveal­ing that almost 40% of Americans, and a much high­er per­cent­age of blacks, believe they would be exclud­ed from serv­ing on death penalty juries.

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