Equal Justice Initiative Releases New Report on Race and Juries
Last month, the Equal Justice Initiative released the findings of its lengthy investigation into issues of race and jury selection. Entitled "Illegal Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection: A Continuing Legacy," the report received some attention from news organizations at the time, but deserves far more careful examination. The report demonstrates conclusively the severe lingering racial discrimination endemic in jury selection, and the often egregiously racist practices used nationwide to keep minorities from serving. Among the more shocking findings are that:
- Some district attorney’s offices explicitly train prosecutors to exclude racial minorities from jury service and teach them how to mask racial bias to avoid a finding that anti-discrimination laws have been violated.
- In some communities, the exclusion of African Americans from juries is extreme. For example, in Houston County, Alabama, 80 percent of African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors in death penalty cases.
- Under current law, it is impossible for African Americans to effectively challenge under-representation in the jury pool in 75 percent of the counties in the United States. For Latinos and Asian Americans, challenges are effectively barred in 90 percent of counties.
The rest of the report's extensive findings follow a similar pattern. Using copious examples, the EJI convincingly demonstrates how prosecutors routinely use peremptory strikes, the practice by which each side in a case may remove a certain number of prospective jurors without stated cause, to exclude jurors they feel might be sympathetic to a defendant because of their race. And because their grounds for removal need not be stated, racial bias is difficult to prove or remedy.
Some might feel that the report confirms what they already basically knew. That the jury system is discriminatory is hardly a major surprise. But the reason the report is actually worth reading is that the sheer extent of the problem is unexpected. There has long been documentation of subtle but insidious structural racism in the courts, but EJI's report illustrates exactly how that racism plays out.
The report suggests there's proof that there needs to be a serious adjustment to the jury selection process in criminal cases. Without more stringent processes for filtering out racism, minorities will continue to be drastically underrepresented on juries. And that's a crisis of democracy.
A jury of one's peers is an essential democratic guarantee, and so until the rot of racism is excised from the American jury, the idea of a "justice" system will remain laughable. The report offers a number of recommendations for exactly how this crisis might be addressed, but the most important thing at the moment is for the problem to be recognized as the pressing political issue that it is, and be given the necessary attention by those in power.
Nathan Robinson is a staff writer for Campus Progress. He attends Brandeis University.
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