Injustice and jury selection

The jury box in the Pershing County, Nevada courthouse.
(Ken Lund/Wikimedia)

Growing up, I seem to remember being taught or hearing the phrase about a right to a trial by a "jury of your peers." I didn't know then that nowhere in the constitution are "peers" mentioned, only the word "impartial." I got taught black history at home, not in school, and my parents discussed the news of the day at the dining table, so I was aware that in many parts of the U.S. we couldn't vote, and the phrase "all-white jury" was often attached to stark injustices taking place. I will never forget the 67 minutes it took for an all-white, all-male jury to acquit the murderers of Emmett Till.

I was eight years old in September of 1955. Over half a century later, blacks, other people of color, and women are still being kept off of juries by the use of several methods, including peremptory challenges and various limitations to the jury pool.

So though the Constitution's Sixth Amendment speaks to impartiality, the question then becomes "can an all-white, all-male jury in the U.S. be impartial?" We have to examine what role discrimination plays in both jury selection, and trial outcomes.

These issues have been well documented by the Equal Justice Initiative, who issued a report on Race and Jury Selection in 2010, which was widely distributed at the time, in media like the NY Times.

And now Duke University has issued a study demonstrating that all-white jury pools in Florida convict black defendants at a 16 percent higher rate.  

Duke University Jury Study

Juries formed from all-white jury pools in Florida convicted black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants, a gap that was nearly eliminated when at least one member of the jury pool was black, according to a Duke University-led study. The researchers examined more than 700 non-capital felony criminal cases in Sarasota and Lake counties from 2000-2010 and looked at the effects of the age, race and gender of jury pools on conviction rates.  

The jury pool typically consisted of 27 members selected from eligible residents in the two counties. From this group, attorneys chose six seated jurors plus alternates. "I think this is the first strong and convincing evidence that the racial composition of the jury pool actually has a major effect on trial outcomes," said senior author Patrick Bayer, chairman of Duke's Economics Department.

"Our Sixth Amendment right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury of our peers is a bedrock of the criminal justice system in the U.S., and yet, despite the importance of that right, there's been very little systematic analysis of how the composition of juries actually affects trial outcomes, how the rules that we have in place for selecting juries impact those outcomes," Bayer said.

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