Age, College Attendance Used to Exclude Black Southern Jurors
SOURCE:
A jury of one’s peers continues to be elusive in the American South, where a new study by the EJI Institute found evidence that blacks are still systematically excluded from jury service. The New York Times reports that the organization, a not-for-profit human rights and legal services group in Montgomery, Alabama, studied eight southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — finding all of them to have areas where racism continues to taint the jury selection process.
The EJI report, which is available through The New York Times, does not contradict the previous body of work on the subject. Racial discrimination in southern juries has persisted even after it was outlawed in 1875, but the recent report offers new evidence of individual cases and gives a look into how racial discrimination continues to be manifest in the South:
We found evidence that some prosecutors employed by state and local governments actually have been trained to exclude people on the basis of race and instructed on how to conceal their racial bias. In many cases, people of color not only have been illegally excluded but also denigrated and insulted with pretextual reasons intended to conceal racial bias. African Americans have been excluded because they appeared to have “low intelligence”; wore eyeglasses; were single, married, or separated; or were too old for jury service at age 43 or too young at 28. They have been barred for having relatives who attended historically black colleges; for the way they walk; for chewing gum; and, frequently, for living in predominantly black neighborhoods.
These pretexual reasons for excluding blacks range from the contradictory — both single and married men and women are apparently ill-prepared to serve — to the outright absurd. For me, the two most troublesome are the use of age — too young at 28 — and the use of attendance at a historically black college to keep people from serving on juries. Although it is difficult to know without the details of each case why the attorneys considered such factors remotely relevant or why the judges accepted the challenges, I can’t conceive of a way in which age alone could ever be used in away that doesn’t taint the jury pool by systematically excluding young or old people. The same goes for attendance of historically black colleges, with the notable exception that it would be acceptable to exclude a potential juror if the case involved the college he or she attended.
The EJI report sets forth some recommendations for improving the jury selection process and reducing racial discrimination. According to its authors, policy-makers will not get the job done alone. Ultimately, attorneys, judges, and administrators who are responsible for the discrimination now will be the ones who have to make a concerted effort to end it:
And while macrolevel decision-makers, such as legislatures and appellate courts, must continue to establish and enforce anti-discrimination norms, the responsibility to end discrimination in our courtrooms necessarily rests in large part with the professionals who spend their daily lives in those courtrooms.
Andrew Bluebond is a staff writer for Campus Progress. He attends Claremont McKenna College.
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