It was not an all-white jury. It was a jury without black jurors.
I won’t defend what the DOJ has become over the past decade. And my experience is not at the federal level.
But at the state trial court level, I saw little of the behavior described by @Chronos. It does happen – and when it does, it’s news, and it should be news, because it’s aberrant. The prosecutors I worked with were, in general, as ethical as the defense attorneys.
Instead of trying to amend a system that has served us well for a couple of centuries, maybe we should get rid of the problem prosecutors in the DOJ.
Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.
It’s not a matter of opinion, though. The numbers exist: What percentage of preemptory challenges are people of color, compared to what percentage of the population in an area? If people of color are getting disproportionately stricken, then there’s a problem with the system, even if it’s hard to pin down precisely where the problems are.
Be careful, here: Weak prosecution can be just as much an instrument of oppression as strong prosecution. With strong prosecution, you convict a lot of members of the target population. With weak prosecution, you let lynch mobs go after members of the target population, and then let the lynchers off the hook.
[Aside]
I’ll have to remember that one. One of my friends from law school is being sworn in as a Provincial Court judge in a couple of weeks. I’ll be going to the ceremony, and I’m looking forward to seeing my buddy, and a few other old classmates, again. Undoubtedly, some gentle ribbing will occur, and that will come in handy. Thanks!
[/Aside]
In the twelfth century, juries were mostly used for civil disputes, like property. Gradually they started usurping the role of trials by combat, compurgitation (essentially proving innocence by making 12 people swear to it), and ordeal (e.g. walking on coals). Only after Pope Innocent III banned clergy from participating in trials by ordeal, in the thirteenth century, did juries become the primary way to try felonies. At the time, jurors not only gave indictments and verdicts but also served as something like witnesses and experts on local knowledge. Jurors were originally hand-picked by the Crown to serve as the King (or lord’s) proxy; the prosecution itself was almost always a private attorney hired by or on behalf of the victim. A for-cause challenge would be submitted to the judge and, if well-taken, the challenged juror would take an oath of voir dire, meaning to tell the truth on pain of perjury, and two specially selected jury members would interrogate and decide whether to keep him. As a matter of practice, the Crown would exclude however many jurors it liked by alleging, pro forma, “quod non boni sunt pro rege” (he is not good for the King), to which the judge, serving at the King’s pleasure, would invariably dismiss the challenged juror from the jury, which was the King’s proxy. To preserve the appearance of fairness, at a time when within living memory trial by ordeal was seen as more fair, the prisoner was allowed thirty-five “peremptory challenges” at common law, just one juror short of three full juries. In the early fourteenth century, Parliament commanded judges to try for-cause challenges in the same fashion for prosecution and defense in an attempt to restrict some of the Crown’s abuse. However, the Crown (including its judges) exploited a loophole by ordering veniremen to “stand by” when their names were called, and only substantiated its challenges when the pool ran out (a right which, though severly restricted, persists to this day).
It took a long time for the medieval jury of presentment to evolve into a distinct, modern, petit jury. Only by the fifteenth century did the concept of an impartial petit jury as independent factfinder finally crystalize. In the early sixteenth century, Parliament reduced the defendant’s peremptory strikes from thirty-five to twenty. Writing in the eighteenth century, when voir dire often consisted more of character evaluation than bias with respect to the defendant, Blackstone describes the purpose of peremptory challenges as two-fold: (1) to give the appearance of fairness by denying the defendant any grounds to claim the jury was anything but impartial, and (2) avoiding situations where the juror becomes resentful following a failed attempt to exclude him for cause. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the size of a petit jury decreased further while voir dire evolved into its modern adversarial and tactical form.
For some 600 years, only the defendant had the right to exercise peremptory challenges, with the number being reduced over time and eventually abolished entirely in England by the 1980s. Meanwhile, U.S. states began granting prosecutors peremptory challenges by statute in the mid-to-late nineteenth century as part of the state-by-state criminal law reform that lead to penal codes enforced by attorneys general displacing unwritten common-law crimes enforced by private prosecutors.
~Max
Yes, they exist, if someone wishes to compile them. Do you have statistics on this?
Remember, there are remedies for these violations that already exist in the appellate process.
And again, if the problem is some lawyers who do this, then why not get rid of the bad lawyers, instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
[Aside to @Spoons] You’re most welcome. 
I think I heard it from a judge.
No, I don’t have the statistics. That was a genuine question, not a rhetorical one.
And the remedy in the appellate process only works if you can prove improper bias in one specific case. It’s a lot easier to demonstrate the existence of a pattern, than it is to show that any particular case is a part of the pattern. In any given case, a lawyer might well be able to demonstrate some other reason why a juror should have been challenged. In some cases, the demonstrated reason might be the correct one. In others, though, the demonstrated reason might be a sham, to cover up the improper reason.
I suppose that one compromise might be to allow the attorneys to specify in advance, before they see who specifically is in the jury pool, what categories of jurors they intend to exclude. Like, in this case, if the prosecution had said “We intend to exclude all educators”, before they saw how many black and non-black educators were in the pool, then it’d be harder to accuse them of racial bias. Though then you still get into the question of whether excluding educators is an appropriate thing to do.
The strikes of the three Black jurors in this case were challenged by the defense as potentially discriminatory. Under the law, the prosecutor then had to provide a non-discriminatory reason, and the court ruled that those reasons were sufficient. News articles are saying that one juror said he’d have a hard time finding a Black defendant guilty. Others were reportedly dismissed not just because they were educators, but rather educators whose particular work roles were somehow close to the circumstances of the case. I don’t know if that means high school teachers, track coaches, or what, so it’s hard to evaluate without more detail.
Yup, and maybe, if the teachers in the pool had been white and the black potential jurors were construction workers, the white teachers would have been stricken, instead. Or maybe, in that case, the prosecution would have come up with some argument for why construction workers would be biased. We don’t know. That’s the problem.
There is a wide gap between “the prosecution can’t strike whoever it wants for no reason at all, as long as they can articulate some explanation other than race” and “lynch mobs.” Or, you know what, maybe there isn’t that much after all, particularly when the victim is white and the accused is black.
That is not so much a justification for why the prosecution should be permitted to exercise peremptory challenges as it is a justification for the belief that the US is a deeply racist country, which only further supports the idea that the police state must be reigned in.
Juries in England can bring a majority verdict, if necessary, so the one hold-up with an agenda can’t derail the process.
I agree with not feeling represented in Congress even though my representative “looks” like me. If I did live in a place represented by someone I agreed with, and people wanted to redistrict to put me in a vilely-represented district in order to create a majority-minority district somewhere else, then I would indeed feel like they took away my representation. This is regardless of whether the end result is more aligned with my party, less aligned with my party (if they stuff so many people into the minority district that they lose seats), or neutral, although in the first case I’d still feel on balance like it was worth it probably even if it took away my representation.
I can’t think of how this analogizes to things beyond electoral politics, though, if it even does.
What a ridiculous accusation which, incidentally, I really don’t appreciate. I also could turn around and say something stupid and racist like, “You want an all Black jury because they’ll find him innocent no matter what because ‘whitey’ deserves what he gets.”
Yes, you could turn around and make a stupid racist argument.
Will you?
Does that really matter in the context of the trial though?
how do you think this
differs from this?
Of course not because name calling and wild, unfounded accusations are not debate. Also, I do sympathize with his mindset because I know where’s he coming from. Our nation’s history is full of horrific racial injustices, so it makes it very hard to trust the system.
I think a key fact which undercuts the argument that race doesn’t matter in a jury is that racists in the Jim Crow era used to ban black people from serving on juries. Racists wouldn’t have insisted on excluding blacks from juries unless they thought it mattered.
I think that lawyers should be able to request the judge to strike a juror. I don’t think that lawyers should be able to do it on their own.
And your method of quoting just two words from each of those posts made it very difficult to figure out what you were actually asking.