Jury Equality

Race plays a major role in the courts today, and we should have a reason to be concerned, simply because it could be easily fixed. Numerous accounts have occurred where racial minorities were denied a fair trial guaranteed by the constitution because of the method used in Jury selection. In addition many of the defendants convicted were subject to harsher punishments solely because of race and the fact that a racially mixed jury tends to be much more scrutinizing. As a society we know that these rights have been violated many times before therefore these problems are not far from being corrected . As a community that promotes equality under our constitution, we should make it our responsibility to keep in mind these factors of behavior and subjectivity in jury selection and attempt to reform jury selection.

The way a jury is selected varies from state to state, but most states select their jury pools using the following qualities (pg. 3): mentally sound, no conviction, physically sound, age, ability to read, write and speak English, prior jury service, key-man characteristics, resident or citizen of the state, resident or qualified elector, resident or citizen of the country, U.S. citizen, and jury solicitation. Examining these closely we find that mentally sound, physically sound and key-man characteristics are all subjective qualities. As a result the subjectivity of all these categories can later be challenged by the prosecutor or defense. In Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials Blaunder found that out of 152 jurors, 21 were black. Blaunder later states that two were excused from the court for prejudice, eight were peremptorily challenged by the prosecution, and one served on the jury. Of the 127 whites, 38 were excused for prejudice, 18 for opposition to the death penalty, 19 for miscellaneous reasons, 13 by prosecution’s challenges and 25 by the defendant’s. This statistic serves to point out the power that both prosecutors and defense have when using peremptory challenges to rule out potential jury members. The problem with this is that one could essentially manipulate the jury to behave in favor of the defense or prosecution and be inclined to act with racism. This issue was brought into the court system in Swain v. Alabama. Swain was a black man convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to death by an all white jury. The case was brought before the Supreme Court on appeal but was denied on the grounds that potential black jurors were all fairly excluded by peremptory challenges. The problem with the law set was that a lawyer could get around excluding jurors using obvious discrimination by simply stating a “race-neutral” explanation for eliminating a juror. For example, in State v. Gaitan (14th par.) a prosecutor stated that a juror's education may cause difficulty in understanding terms. The Judge can overrule a challenge, but the prosecutor or defense could easily persuade them citing more "race-neutral" reasons for removing the juror. Excluding minorities from juries could potentially impact whether the case is more sympathetic to the defense or prosecution. This also, as studies indicate, promotes racism and the removal of objective decision making from individual jurors. Racism is still used in this practice, even after the Batson v. Kentucky case, which overturned Swain v. Alabama stating that the prosecutor cannot dismiss jurors on the sole basis of race (the prosecutor had excluded 4 black jurors). These practices point out the little progress we as a society have made in the movement of racial equality. It sickens me to think that loopholes still exist that promote racism and the misrepresentation of minorities, especially in the Justice system where they are crucially needed to maintain an individual's civil rights.
Jury Selection methods and whether race affects a jury’s decision has been widely controversial. Cases like the O.J. Simpson trial -consisting of a jury of nine blacks, one hispanic, and one white- have been influenced by racial factors. A couple of years earlier the police that injured Rodney King were acquitted by a mostly white jury. The media coverage of the case seemed to set a precedent to promote more diverse jury compositions. Both cases served to point out that one sided racial composition can skew decision making and eliminate the objectiveness nessecary to carry out cases. Many argue even if race didn’t affect a jury’s decision, giving minorities the honor to serve in the U.S. Justice system will at least help ensure equal treatment under law. Rebecca Saxe summarized the study in which Sommer conducted an experiment that gave insight on the behavior of racial mock juries (some were racially mixed others were all white). The trial was of a black defendant who allegedly sexually assaulted two white women separately. 55% of the mock juries voted to acquit, just as the real jury had. It seemed as though both mixed and all white juries mentioned race as an issue when deciding. When the white juries brought up the issue of racism, in every case there was at least one juror that objected that racism was not relevant to the case; compared to 22% of objections in mixed juries. To summarize in her words both the anticipation and the experience of serving on a diverse jury seemed to sharpen the white jurors’ sensitivity not just to race but to accuracy and due process. From this study we can conclude that a racially mixed jury does influence other jurors individual behaviors. If jurors show these patterns based on others we could potentially be adminstering justice subjectively. Subjective decisions, or racial motivated decisions, lead us as a society towards placing values on indivuals based on race, its indirectly arguing against the 14th amendment. Baldus and his other colleagues conducted several studies of capital cases in different areas and found that the defendant's race influences death sentences. Black defendants, according to Baldus, were four times more likely to receive the death penalty than White defendants. They have also found that defendant and victim race are correlated with a jury's degree of conviction, such that Black defendants are given much longer sentences than White defendants when the victim is White. But the study suggests that we shouldn’t be convinced of the results because other cases have contradicted these studies. This study points out that jurors are racially sensitive to defendants depending on race. This could imply that if a jury is not racially mixed they could convict someone to death based on race, violating the 8th amendment and the 14th amendment- not granting equal protection under the law and being subject to cruel and unusual punishment. In another study Mock jurors composed from college students and prospective jurors decided over a civil case of sexual harassment. The study suggested there was “racial bias among White mock jurors against Black plaintiffs: Lower damages were recommended for Black plaintiffs than for White plaintiffs.” Individuals act out to their own liking even it’s looked down upon in society. It’s as the study says “Racism in contemporary American society involves a disinclination among Whites to engage in obvious acts of discrimination against Blacks. When Discrimination against Blacks occurs, Whites need to be able to justify it on grounds other than just race”. The research points out that there does exist behavior problems within races in the Jury box. Clearly jury members act individually without the socially unacceptable walls that would be in place in a public setting. The way juries are selected could potentially lead to these behavioral problems.

Racial bias in Jury Selection has been a problem since the creation of the 14^th and 6^th Amendments. Juries have not always fairly been selected from a cross-section of the community or upheld the Equal protection clause of the 14^th amendment by including minorities in the jury pool. The 6^th amendment states that this jury should be impartial, representative, and fair. Now how these civil rights are carried out is subject to the interpretations of our court system. But our system works to correct itself, and it has by establishing new statues of the for criminal procedures (Abigail Funk, Jury Selection and Racial Discrimination): 18 U.S.C.§243 and 28 U.S.C.A. § 1861 et seq. The first statue states that a person will not be disqualified from jury service because of race. The second is much more specific and states “no Citizen shall be excluded from service as a grand or petit juror in the district courts of the United States on account of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or economic status”. The statues set up a way to increase equality when selecting jurors. But these laws were still violated many times in history. Possibly the most infamous case in which a racial minority was not given the proper fair representation was the murder of Emmett Till. In 1955 Mississippi, a 14 year old black teenager was murdered by two men after whistling at the store owner’s wife. Both men were arrested and charged with murder, but later acquitted by an all white male jury. Now granted that this was in the South before the civil rights movement, but we have to analyze the way jury selection and racial bias has been used to progress both racial inequality over history and manipulate decisions. In 1957 Willie Edwards was murdered by Klansmen, no one was charged. The case was later reopened in1976 but was thrown out by a judge due to insufficient evidence. This cases markes the progress that our courtsystem is making by reopening cases that were not fairly carried out due to racial bias. Though sometimes they do examine cases again they fail to carry out any real justice because of the loose definitions and interpretations of the law. Another occurrence took place here in Greensboro North Carolina in 1979. After the dubbed “Greensboro massacre” two criminal trials were conducted with all white juries; keep in mind this occurred in a predominantly black neighborhood, yet no one was convicted. Most of these cases I’ve recanted occurred in the South which has been plagued with racism since the establishment of the Jim Crow laws. In the past decade we have seen cases in which police have misused their power and beaten civilians. Some argue that they have the right to do so. However I believe that when someone is brutality beaten and asphyxiates to death (under the Jonny Gammage Law) by 5 police officers and only two get charged with manslaughter and all are acquitted this is due to racial bias in the jury. The only black man voted against acquittal of these police officers and the case was declared a hung jury but the court decided against a retrial. When the penalty for committing a crime amounts to death or life in prison we cannot simply disregard the problem, simply because we could potentially be convicting them solely on racism. In 2000 our nation’s population was composed of 12% African Americans, 3.6% Asian, 0.9% American and Alaska native, 0.1% Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander and 5.5 percent was other than white. Now consider the fact that in 2006 about 58% of our prison population (pg. 6) was made up of minorities, of those about 39% were Black and 16% were Hispanic. Now, what does this say about our justice system? Many argue that minorities are more likely to commit crimes because they are exposed to harsh environments. This may be the case but if our prisons contain minority criminals, they are to be tried without any violation of their 14^th amendment and 6^th amendment rights. Juries can potentially give them a conviction based on race. Take the following two cases: Darryl Hunt of North Carolina was convicted twice to life in prison by an all white jury. After 19 year he was let free because of DNA proving his innocence. As we’ve seen from the studies, juries tended to give blacks defendant a harsher punishment than a white defendant, especially if the victim is white. A fine example is in 1998 John W. King from Texas, who murdered a black many by dragging him behind a pick up truck. He was the Second man in Texas be sentenced to death since the 1850’s. Now granted, the jury consisted of one black man. If more racially mixed jurors were available, not only would jury feel more sympathy for the defendant and not easily convicted them, but they would also be conscious of the opinions of individuals with different experiences. Thomas El Miller had his death sentence overturned because they believed the jury selection was excluding black jurors by peremptory strikes from the prosecutor. We as a society should make sure that juries fairly represent a defendant to establish some form of objective justice. To do so we must recognize that numerous factors in how juries are selected can change the way a case administers justice. There will always be individuals who serve in juries that decide solely based on prejudices, but if we uniformly modify the requirements that a one needs to be a jury and make them less subjective we could establish some fair representation. Everything in our justice system is subjective, we need to strive to remove subjectivity because of all the inequalities that result from it.