Entries tagged with “Jury Selection”
Apr 30, 2026
“The Miscarriage of Batson v. Kentucky”: Forty Years Since the Landmark Ruling Challenging Racial Imbalance in Jury Selection Proceedings
Today, the state of Texas plans to execute James Broadnax, a Black man who challenged the state for its discriminatory use of peremptory strikes to exclude every Black juror at his trial, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Batson v. Kentucky (1986). Barring a last-minute stay, Mr. Broadnax’s execution will coincide with the 40th anniversary of Batson that put race at the forefront of the jury selection process. Racial bias in jury selection has been a feature of…
Feb 25, 2026
Black History: Forty Years After Supreme Court Upheld “Death Qualification” of Juries, Data Consistently Shows Disproportionate Racial Exclusion
The Constitution mandates that juries be drawn from a “fair cross-section” of the community. Yet public opinion polls show that a substantial portion of the community opposes the death penalty. How, then, can the government seat a jury that will fairly decide whether to impose the death penalty and protect a defendant’s constitutional jury rights? The legal system’s longstanding answer to this question is a procedure called “death qualification,” which allows prosecutors to dismiss any…
Dec 19, 2025
U.S. Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Mississippi Death Penalty Case Alleging Race Based Jury Discrimination
The U.S Supreme Court announced on December 15, 2025, that it will hear the appeal of Mississippi death-sentenced prisoner Terry Pitchford, who has argued his constitutional rights were violated because of race discrimination during jury selection. Mr. Pitchford was sentenced to death nearly two decades ago for his role in the shooting death of Reuben Britt. At the center of Mr. Pitchford’s case is Doug Evans, a Mississippi district attorney whose conduct has drawn repeated scrutiny. DA Evans…
Religion
,Women
,Jul 08, 2025
ACLU Report Shows How Death Penalty Jury Selection Discriminates Against Black Americans, Women, and People of Faith
A new report from the ACLU documents how the process of selecting juries for death penalty cases systematically excludes Black prospective jurors, women, and people of faith, fundamentally undermining the constitutional promise of a trial by a jury of one’s peers. The report, Fatal Flaws: Revealing the Racial and Religious Gerrymandering of the Capital Jury, examines the practice of “death qualification,” a requirement that potential jurors must be willing to impose a death sentence to serve on…
Issues
Feb 27, 2024
States’ Failure to Collect Juror Race Information Contributes to “Whitewashed” Jury Box, Berkeley Law Report Finds
A new report from Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic finds that just 19 states collect race and ethnicity information from prospective jurors, meaning that a majority of states cannot ensure that their juries are a “representative cross-section of the community” as mandated by the Constitution. The report, Guess Who’s Coming to Jury Duty?, recommends that all states “adopt a uniform questionnaire” to obtain prospective jurors’ race or ethnicity and that state courts annually publish…
Issues
Feb 20, 2024
Op-Ed: Law Professor Stephen Bright Encourages SCOTUS to Review “Egregious Racial Discrimination” in Georgia Death Row Prisoner’s Case
In a February 14, 2024 op-ed published in the Washington Post, the longtime defense lawyer, former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, and law professor Stephen Bright highlights the continued illegal exclusion of Black jurors in violation of Batson v. Kennedy (1986). The op-ed titled, “Struck from a jury for being Black? It still happens all too often,” uses the case of Georgia death-sentenced prisoner Warren King, whose petition the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to review on…
Issues
Dec 20, 2023
Batson Relief for Another Mississippi Prisoner Prosecuted by Doug Evans
On December 12, 2023 U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills overturned Terry Pitchford’s death sentence and ordered Mississippi to retry him in 6 months or release him from custody. Judge Mills found that the original trial judge failed to allow the defense to properly challenge the exclusion of Black jurors by now-retired District Attorney Doug Evans, the same prosecutor who prosecuted Curtis Flowers. “This court cannot ignore the notion that Pitchford was seemingly given no chance to rebut the…
Issues
Oct 20, 2022
Commentary: North Carolina’s Use of Death Qualification Disenfranchises Black People From Serving on Death Penalty Juries
The process of death qualification, which excludes people who oppose the death penalty from serving on capital juries, is racially discriminatory, civil rights advocate Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II wrote in an October 10, 2022 op-ed. Rev. Barber and his co-authors, pastor Dumas Harshaw Jr. and preacher Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, introduce their article with a recognition of J.W. Hood, a Black man and AME Zion pastor, who fought to abolish slavery and co-authored North Carolina’s modern…
Issues
Sep 23, 2022
North Carolina ACLU Challenges Death Qualification of Jurors as Racially and Sexually Discriminatory
Lawyers for a North Carolina capital defendant have filed a sweeping challenge to the method by which death-penalty jurors are empaneled, arguing that the combination of a process known as “death qualification” and discretionary jury strikes produces a jury so racially and sexually unrepresentative that it violates a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Death qualification refers to the process of removing potential jurors from service in a capital case because of their expressed opposition to…
Issues
May 04, 2022
Jury Selection Chaos and Confusion Causes Further Delays in Parkland Shooting Capital Sentencing Trial
The capital sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (pictured) in Parkland, Florida has been delayed once again as jury selection in the high-profile case devolved into chaos and confusion. The fourth week of jury selection in Cruz’s penalty trial was postponed after Broward County Judge Elizabeth Scherer granted a prosecution motion to restart jury selection based upon the improper removal of 11 jurors from the case, then later…
Issues
Mar 08, 2022
Nearly Six Years After Supreme Court Granted Him a New Trial, Timothy Foster Resentenced to Life
Timothy Foster, whose conviction and death sentence were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 because Georgia prosecutors discriminatorily struck Black jurors from serving in his case, has been resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. On March 4, 2022, Foster (pictured) pleaded guilty in a Rome, Georgia courtroom and accepted the life sentence after prosecutors agreed to drop the death penalty in his case. The plea deal ends a 35-year legal odyssey that began in…
Issues
Nov 11, 2021
Citing Race Discrimination, Nashville Judge Reverses Conviction of Tennessee Death-Row Prisoner Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman, Approves Plea Deal for Life Sentence
A Nashville judge has for a second time approved a plea deal that would remove Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman from Tennessee’s death row and resentence him to life without possibility of parole. On November 9, 2021, Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Monte Watkins entered an order overturning Abdur’Rahman’s 1987 conviction based on former Davidson County Assistant District Attorney General John Zimmerman’s unconstitutional use of discretionary strikes to remove African Americans from the jury. The…
Research
Federal Death Penalty
,Oct 14, 2021
Supreme Court Hears Argument on Department of Justice Efforts to Reinstate Death Penalty in Boston Marathon Bombing Case
A United States Supreme Court sharply divided along ideological lines heard oral argument October 13, 2021 on the Department of Justice’s appeal of a federal circuit court’s ruling overturning the death sentences imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his convictions in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Veteran court watchers reported that the six conservative justices seemed poised to overturn the federal appeal court’s grant of a new penalty phase hearing to Tsarnaev and to return the case to the…
Issues
Sep 13, 2021
Death-Row Exoneree Curtis Flowers Sues Mississippi Prosecutor Who Prosecuted Him Six Times
Former Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Flowers (pictured), who was exonerated in 2020, is suing the officials whose misconduct led to his arrest and repeated wrongful conviction. Flowers was tried six times and spent 23 years wrongfully incarcerated for a quadruple murder in a white-owned furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. In a complaint filed September 3, 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Flowers alleges that his trial prosecutor, an…
Issues
Mar 12, 2021
Texas Federal Appeals Court Refuses to Consider Suppressed Evidence of Dallas Prosecutors’ Race-Based Jury Selection Practices, Upholds Conviction and Death Sentence
A federal appeals court has permitted a Texas district court to dismiss a death-row prisoner’s claim that Dallas prosecutors unconstitutionally struck Black jurors in his case without considering evidence of racial discrimination that prosecutors had withheld from the defense during state court litigation on the issue. The February 8, 2021 ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upholds the conviction and death sentence imposed on James Broadnax for his participation in the…
Issues
Religion
,Women
,Feb 15, 2021
Capital Case Roundup — Death Penalty Court Decisions the Week of February 8, 2021
NEWS (2/11/21) — Alabama: In a splintered vote with three conservative justices noting their dissents, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Alabama Attorney General’s application to vacate a federal appeals court injunction that had halted that night’s scheduled execution of Willie B. Smith III unless the state permitted his pastor to be present in the death chamber to provide religious comfort during his execution. In a second night-of-execution order, the Court lifted a stay of execution based…
Issues
Federal Death Penalty
,Nov 17, 2020
Lawyers for Orlando Hall Seek to Stay His Execution Based Upon Systemic and Case-Specific Evidence of Racial Discrimination
Lawyers for federal death-row prisoner Orlando Hall (pictured), who is scheduled to be executed on November 19, 2020, have filed a motion to stay his execution based upon evidence that his death sentence was a product of pervasive racial discrimination. In pleadings filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana on November 12, Hall, who is Black, argues that his conviction and death sentence are the unconstitutional product of systemic racial discrimination in the…
Issues
Oct 26, 2020
Capital Case Roundup — Death Penalty Court Decisions the Week of October 19, 2020
NEWS (10/22/20) — Florida: The Florida Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and death sentence for Daniel Craven, Jr. for a 2015 prison murder. The court denied Craven’s claims that he was unconstitutionally denied the right to represent himself and that the trial court had violated his right to a fair jury by impaneling an African-American juror whom defense counsel had attempted to peremptorily strike. It also rejected several challenges Craven posed to the aggravating circumstances…
Issues
Sep 28, 2020
North Carolina Supreme Court Restores Life Sentences to Three Prisoners Whose Death Sentences Violated Racial Justice Act
The North Carolina Supreme Court has ordered that three African American death-row prisoners who had proven that their death sentences violated the state’s since repealed Racial Justice Act (RJA) must be resentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. In three decisions issued on September 25, 2020, the court ruled that North Carolina had violated constitutional principles of double jeopardy and the prohibitions against after-the-fact enhancements of punishment when the…
Issues
Apr 05, 2018
NEW PODCAST — Racial Discrimination in Death-Penalty Jury Selection: A Conversation with Steve Bright
Race discrimination exists at every stage of the death-penalty process, says veteran death-penalty and civil-rights lawyer Stephen B. Bright (pictured), but “the most pervasive discrimination that is going on is in jury selection.” In a new Discussions With DPIC podcast, Bright — the former President of the Southern Center for Human Rights who has argued jury discrimination cases three times in the U.S. Supreme Court — calls the “rampant” racial discrimination in jury selection “a matter of grave…
Issues
Mar 23, 2018
Jury Notes Show Georgia Prosecutors Empaneled White Juries to Try Black Death-Penalty Defendants
New court filings argue that Columbus, Georgia prosecutors had a pattern and practice of systematically striking black prospective jurors because of their race, discriminatorily empanelling all- or nearly-all-white juries to try black defendants on trial for their lives in capital murder cases. In a supplemental motion seeking a new trial for Johnny Gates (pictured) — a black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury in 1977 for the rape and murder of a white woman — lawyers from the Southern…
Issues
Nov 17, 2016
Louisiana Supreme Court Orders New Trial for Rodricus Crawford in Controversial Caddo Parish Death Penalty Case
The Louisiana Supreme Court has overturned the conviction of Rodricus Crawford (pictured) and ordered that he be given a new trial in a controversial death penalty case that attracted national attention amid evidence of race discrimination, prosecutorial excess, and actual innocence. Crawford was convicted of murdering his young son based upon the testimony of a local doctor who claimed the boy had been suffocated, although autopsy results showed pervasive bronchopneumonia in the boy’s lungs…
Issues
May 23, 2016
Supreme Court Rules Georgia Prosecutors Struck Death Penalty Jurors Because They Were Black, Grants New Trial
On May 23, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction and death sentence of Timothy Foster (pictured) because Georgia prosecutors improperly exercised their discretionary jury strikes on the basis of race to exclude African American jurors. The vote was 7 – 1, with Justice Thomas the lone dissenter. Foster is now entitled to a new trial. Foster, who is black, was sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors used their peremptory challenges to remove every black…
Issues
Oct 29, 2015
Amid Threatening Comments by Current DA, Death Penalty Dominates Caddo Parish Prosecutor Election
Capital punishment is dominating the discussion in the runoff election between James E. Stewart, Sr. and Dhu Thompson to succeed acting Caddo Parish, Louisiana District Attorney Dale Cox. Cox’s controversial statements about the death penalty — including that the state needs to “kill more people” — have focused national attention on the parish, which ranks among the two percent of U.S. counties responsible for 56 percent of the inmates on death row nationwide. On October 27, defense attorneys…
Issues
Aug 18, 2015
STUDIES: Racial Bias in Jury Selection
A new study of trials in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, revealed that potential jurors who were black were much more likely to be struck from juries than non-blacks. The results were consistent with findings from Alabama, North Carolina, and other parts of Louisiana, highlighting an issue that will be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court this fall. In Caddo Parish, an area known for its many death sentences, prosecutors used peremptory strikes against 46% of black jurors, but only 15% of other jurors…