Racial Composition of Juries

Great Debates
1

Judge Halts Trial to Add Blacks to Jury

It’s a pretty well known “secret” that the race of a juror can play a factor in how he will decide. (This came to fore in the Rodney King, OJ, and Yankel Rosenbaum trials). But the remarkable thing about this case here is that it is saying that intent doesn’t matter. If that is the case, then by what rationale do we need any number of blacks on a jury? Let’s assume that a black guy on trial for a police shootout has a better chance the more blacks there are on his jury. For what reason should the guy be given a better chance to beat the rap just because he happens to live in community that contains a lot of blacks? The only reason I can see for the cross-section of the community standard is if it is being used as an indicator that blacks (or whoever) are being deliberately excluded. If all agree that it is not, I don’t see any validity to it.

Now I should qualify that - as I understand it - there is no legal bar to having any particular racial composition of a jury in any specific case. IOW if random fluctuation produced a jury in a particular case that was not representative of the population at large, no one can complain (although in practice, it is well known that lawyers use their challenge prerogatives to strike members of groups that they feel will not help their case). The only legal issue would be if the system as a whole tends to produce juries that are not representative. Still, I don’t think there is anything magical about the racial composition of a given area. There is nothing that makes that composition the right one to have. So if having 75% whites on a jury is considered to be just and fair enough in one area, I don’t see why we should suddenly assume that black defendants don’t get a fair enough shot under this system in another area. Unless - again - there is deliberate tampering.

2

Different reactions by different sorts of jurors are nothing new. They are associated with many factors other than race. Consider the famous 1936 essay HOW TO PICK A JURY by Clarence Darrow.

IMHO the judiciary should ignore a juror’s race, just as they ignore her religion, nationality or profession. A juror is a person. Period.

3

It gets really complex when you actually try to sit down and decide what race is the juror.

4

Izzy, you probably haven’t heard of the Scottsboro Boys case, have you, to be saying something like that.

Having Blacks in the jury does not guarantee that a black person will get off scot free.

What is this a case of is using statistics to prove disparity of result as a basis of the system breaking down, and the laws governing that system unconstitiutional because of that breakdown. The Supreme Court generally rules that such statistics cannot be used as evidence to determine constitutionality (a 5-4 death penalty case turned on whether the fact that evidence of Black people being disproportionally sentenced relative to Whites, is relevant evidence in determining the constitutionality of the death penalty. The majority said no.) But federal and state judges do make constitutional decisions based on such statistical studies. Many conservatives mock liberals because one of the biggest advocates of applying statistics in determining whether a law is constitutional decisions is Robert Bork, whom the liberals rejected out of hand.

5

Jury selection is an art unto itself. I really can’t offer a cite because I was the defendant.

While riding my motorcycle I was stopped by the local gendarmes,charged with DWI and transported to the County Jail. I did not do any sobriety or breathalyser test of any type. I never actually refused but insisted on legal council first. They eventually (3 hours) gave up,videotaped and booked me. I met with my lawyer the next day and explained to him that since my mother was one of the founders of the local MADD chapter I could not take a “deal” and we were in for the long haul…

Nine months later we’re going into the jury trial. During the introductions to the jury pool my lawyer asked if my appearance (shoulder length hair and full beard) would adversly affect anyones ability to be impartial and 6 or 7 raised their hands and were dismissed. (We’re talking about West Texas.) After all the strikes and procedure I ended up with a jury of my “peers”. The six member jury was composed of 4 women and 2 men. One woman was Caucasian and the rest were either Spanish or African American. Not one member of that jury was under 55. My attorney was also an old schoolmate and an excellent lawyer on previous but I was seriously considering throwing him out the window and making a run for the border.

The trial went on for the rest of the day and the jury went out to deliberate about 3 PM of the following day. They returned in 23 minutes with a Not Guilty verdict. (John said it was a new record for him and I didn’t have time to finish my smoke.)

The Strategy: As the prosecution had no “hard” evidence except for the videotape which was as much in my favor as theirs. (The cops looked like assholes for screaming at me to perform a sobriety test.) John picked a jury that he could be reasonably sure had never been on a motorcycle in their life and convinced them that you can’t ride one while intoxicated. Jury of my peers? I think not. They were,however,perfectly capable of listening to the facts and making a judgement based on those facts.

6

It is an incorrect belief that black jurors are easier on black defendants. Black on black crime is a huge problem, & the typical black juror wants hoodlums off the streets like anyone else. This is the irony of the OJ case. Clark regularly coinvicted black criminals in downtown LA, so she figured OJ was the same. Any other comments would be beating a dead horse. I did advise an atty once to get as many older mothers & grandmas on a jury-the defendant, an 18 year old mother tried to poison her baby. The judge was pissed-the jury rejected attempted murder & she only got 6 years. “a mother must be impaired to hurt their baby,” they later said.

7

What about a ‘trial of your peers’? Is there any validity to the notion that the jury should roughly reflect the racial makeup of the area in which the crime was committed? I could be wrong but I imagine a jury impaneled of inner city minorities might have a different bent than a jury of white southern baptists. Theoretically the evidence should speak for itself and the jury should do its job regardless of race, religion, wealth, etc. Obviously that isn’t the case though as even the judicial system recognizes potential bias in jurors (allowing attorneys to dismiss potential jurors before the trial starts).

8

I don’t accept the premise that people of different races in the same community think differently. As long as the jury pool is selectged as randomly as possible, the racial make up is irrelevant.

9

John Mace if you don’t believe that there are extraordinary disparities of commonly held belief and strong commonalities of points of view based upon racial (and class, which is often race-tied, especially in urban America) affiliation, I’d have to believe that you’re either unacquainted with many outside of your race, you haven’t had many meaningful conversations with people outside of your race or you know a very odd cross-section of people.

I find this especially true in regard to issues of law enforcement and social justice. If you go into any major urban area and ask a number of the black residents of that city “Do you believe that the police routinely arrest the wrong person just to make it seem that they’ve made progress with an unsolved crime even when that’s not true?” you’ll get decidedly different answers than if you posed the same question to the same number of whites or Asians in that city. I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw strong similarities in the responses from Hispanics in that city, though.

There is empirical evidence that black defendants tend to receive harsher sentences than white defendants found guilty of similar crimes, especially when the crime has a white victim. Black people in many cities have also seen a disturbing number of instances in which questionable police conduct against their own is given a pass; the officers are either held unaccountable for their actions or face minimal departmental discipline. Whether one wants to accept it or not, these sorts of things have a negative impact on the way that many members of the black community view the workings of the criminal justice system, as a whole. This skepticism is brought with them to jury boxes and can have a significant - and positive - effect on the outcome of trials.

10

Relevant Supreme Court cases:

Swain v. Alabama (1965)

Batson v. Kentucky (1986)

11

I notice that many posters are thinking this problem through from the defendant’s perspective.

The Court also considers the potential juror’s perspective (the thinking being that black citizens should not be denied the opportunity to participate in our justice system).

A defendant can challenge the exclusion of blacks from the jury pool whether or not the defendant himself is black.

12

Further to my last point, criminal defendants are also prohibited from selecting jurors on the basis of race. Georgia v. McCollum, US Supreme Court (1992).

13

Batson is perhaps the most side-stepped, loopholed decision ever put out there by the Supremes. Its mandates are consistently observed in the letter but flouted in the spirit.

Bah.

14

First, I think that premise does have validity. But more importantly, the problem is not in the racial makeup of the jury, but in the racial makeup of the jury pool. 12% of the community is being <i>consistently</i> underselected for the jury pool. Which says that it isn’t being selected as randomly as possible and that something is wrong with the randomized selection process that they’re using. They need to find one that actually does pull a random selection of the community, rather than the one they’ve got now which skews.

15

Sorry to disapoint you, but none of those statements is true.

I should clarify my earlier statement, though. From a defendant’s position (or either the defense or prosecuting attorney’s), I can see the use of race as one factor in jury selection. However, for the state to assume that a white person cannot adequatedly judge a black person, or vice versa, is a form of state sponsored racism.

16

I’m not sure if I understand everything about juries (I’ve only seen movies, really), but I was always under the impression that being a juror was just about deductive reasoning, and the ability, not to not have prejudices, but to put aside one’s prejudices in favor of careful, calculated rationality.

For instance, if there were two almost identical cases in which someone killed a store clerk and the defendant in one case was an unemployed man with a criminal record and the defendant in the other was a straight-A, community-serving college student with no criminal record, the jurors are obviously going to be prejudiced, regardless of the races of either individuals. But the members of a jury will put aside those prejudices and use only the evidence of the case–what is presented and what is not presented in court–to determine whether the suspect is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

I always thought this was one of the great things about the film “12 Angry Men”, where a black man is put on trial and a jury, which I believe has no black men on it and is composed mostly of middle-class white folks, many of whom are prejudiced, concludes through deductive reasoning that the man is not guilty. Of course, this is only a movie, but I think that Read_neck’s story is an example of this kind of thing in action.

It would follow that requiring the jury to be of a certain demographic make-up is tantamount to saying “hey, it’s ok that you have prejudices and aren’t willing to put those aside for a little while to decide a major issue about this defendant’s life; we’ll just get somebody else who is prejudiced the opposite way to cancel you out.”

If we accept this mentality, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be obligated to construct juries to be composed of far more than just racial or ethnic diversity; we would have to have an incredible diversity of religions, vocations, economic classes, ages, and anything else that could possibly make a person prejudiced, which is, well everything. It’s not my intent to show that this is impractical; this is more of a reductio ad absurdum to indicate the futility of the sentiment that “human beings can’t put aside their prejudices for a problem that requires only deductive reasoning.”

Also, accepting this statement and also requiring that “juries be made up of a cross-section of the [local] community” would be rather silly if a white man was on trial for killing a black man in a community that was 99% white.

I could be wrong on all this, as I said I know fairly little about our actual justice system. If juries ever need to take motives into consideration, then I suppose deductive reasoning can be put aside (which is a scary thing, imo) and a diverse demographic could help in providing alternate interpretations for motives; this could easily result in a lot of psychological obfuscation, as no one can actually know what someone is thinking, they can only know what someone has done. Does a jury ever have to decide, say, whether a murder was caused maliciously or accidentally? Does the intent ever change the sentencing of a case?

Ug, it seems like accounting for intentionality would throw a wrench into the whole justice system.

Maybe I should’ve watched more Law and Order when I was growing up. :slight_smile:

17

Sorry, this was a pretty silly thing for me to say. Of course intentionality is taken into account, in which case perhaps one does need as diverse a jury as possible. I guess this makes tons of room for psychological obfuscation, defamation of character, etc, which is maybe something jurors just have to try to be aware of.

18

John Mace wrote:

I wonder if you would feel that way if you were a black man accused of raping a white woman in, oh, say, Mississippi?

Have you noticed how many convicted rapists have been released on dna evidence in the past few years? Juries can and do make mistakes, and those mistakes often arise (at least in part) from pre-existing stereotypes and prejudices.

19

“Adequately judge” and “thinks differently” are two very different animals. Are you retracting your first comment entirely or just backpedaling?

Besides – adequately judging isn’t the issue, the issue is whether or not different perspectives are being excluded from the jury system because the selection process for the jury pool (not individual juries, but the system which puts butts in the seats to start with) is broken. It’s hard to imagine that a system which has ignored roughly 2/3 of prospective jurors from any subset of the population can be considered to be a good, useful, working system.

That the brokenness of the system can and does lead to injustices in courts of law should make this an issue of concern to everyone. This is something that must be addressed.

Setting aside prejudices, yes. Setting aside your ability to reason from a position supported by your own knowledge, absolutely not.

To create a really silly example, did you ever see the episode of Happy Days when The Fonz and Mr. C. were on a jury of a man accused of stealing a woman’s purse while on a motorcycle? Fonz was the lone holdout for acquital because he knew something wasn’t quite right about the prosecution story and when he was able to think about it, he realized that the guy couldn’t have been guilty because the hand that he would’ve needed to snatch the purse was also the hand he needed to accelerate on his particular model of motorcycle. He brought his knowledge into the situation and made a judgment.

To give a more particular for instance, I’d hate to be a defendant who had a black alibi witness who said that we were together somewhere other than where the crime occurred “for a minute” to an all-white jury.

20

This is no accident, and not unintentional.

Jurors are commonly picked from voter registration. I dont believe that in my state we write down the race of people who vote, therefore, how can you select juries by race?

Furthermore, more blacks are put into prisons than whites, thus causing more blacks to lose their constitutional rights( such as owning guns and voting).

YOu will NEVER!!! get a fair/proportionate representation of any race if you, as long as you, continue to convict/imprison a higher percentage of that race, and take away the votng and other constitutional rights of a race.