I served on a jury in Inglewood circa 2003 for a black man who blew blood alcohol tests way above the legal limit. He was clearly guilty but the three blacks on the jury said that enough young black men were in jail and they weren’t going to convict a brother. So the jury was hung.
In general, blacks and Muslims seem to exhibit a strong sense of group identity and group solidarity and that makes them a poor choice for juries and other objective roles.
What about Jews? Some Jews have such an attachment to their group that they won’t vote to convict a fellow Jew. I suspect most Jews in America are not that Jewishly committed, but I suspect Jews on juries will be less likely to vote to convict a Jew than would non-Jews.
This issues touches on the problems of a multicultural society containing groups that have more loyalty to their group than to the nation state. It seems to me that any group that has such loyalty to their own group that they won’t act in the interests of their country, is a danger.
What are good measures of citizenship? It seems to me that WASPs create the least corrupt countries. WASP countries tend to be high trust countries until they overrun by non-WASPs.
NYT Editorial Board: Excluding Blacks From Juries
In requiring prosecutors to give a “race-neutral” reason for excluding black jurors, the court wrote that racial discrimination in jury selection “harms not only the accused whose life or liberty they are summoned to try,” but undermines “public confidence in the fairness of our system of justice.”
Mr. Foster was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. For nearly three decades since, state prosecutors have denied that race was a factor in their decision to strike all the black jurors from his trial. They have also steadfastly refused to turn over their jury-selection notes to defense lawyers.
Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case, Foster v. Chatman, to decide whether the prosecutors are telling the truth. The Georgia courts have all ruled in the state’s favor. But now those jury-selection notes are at the center of the case. Almost 20 years after Mr. Foster’s conviction, his lawyers finally got hold of them through the state’s open-records law.
The notes show that, contrary to prosecutors’ claims, race was indeed central to their decision to exclude certain jurors. Each black potential juror’s name is highlighted in green and marked with a “B”. The first four names on a handwritten list of “Definite NOs” are those of the black jurors who were struck. In a separate list, those jurors are ranked against one another, “in case it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.”
More wisdom is to be found in the NYT comments section:
* As anyone who has ever sat on a jury can tell you, juries are very unrepresentative. Most working people don’t want to sit on juries. To miss 6-8 days of work for an auto accident is just too much for most hard working Americans. You are left with young, unemployed people and retirees.
* I guess the prosecution of OJ Simpson was not guilty of stacking the jury pool. With a nearly all black jury, white Americans were shocked when known murderer Orenthal Simpson was acquitted of his gruesome crimes and millions of African Americans cheered. The OJ trial revealed that bias in the courtroom is a two-way street. Later of course, OJ all but admitted to murdering Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. How tragic that black bias prevented the families of OJ’s victims from receiving justice for their loves one. How biased and unjust.
* Google for a November 4, 1994 NYT article on the use of peremptory challenges to ensure a mostly black jury in the OJ Simpson case – there was only one white.
And how they cheered when he was acquitted!
Yes, the abuse works both ways.
* Now. Let’s ask the question “why?”. Why would potential jurors who are black be rejected?
* This is a two-way street. Given the concept of jury nullification, most notably demonstrated in the OJ Simpson trial, perhaps the prosecution is on to something. Johnny Cochran played the jury like a violin and used the subtle inference of “us vs. them” to let a murderer walk free.
* This article references a complex multifaceted area of the law/government in passing as its author conducts a racism shaming exercise based on biased and false assertions, it does us readers and our intelligence a disservice. This is not a scholarly article about peremptory challenges, it is paying lip service to it while using it as a vehicle to judge and condemn an entire legal system/branch of the government as racist. You could find a law review article that tells you more about the challenges and their history left out of this article that contradicts the author’s conclusion, and any trial lawyer will tell you there are many situations where whites are excluded from juries based on their race. This article is just embarrassing, starts nowhere, goes nowhere, gives you 1% of the information, makes grandiose claims about race without coming close to supporting it.
* So… a jury that INCLUDES African-Americans simply because they’re black will be a better judge of the innocence or guilt of the defendent than one that EXCLUDES African-Americans simply because they’re black? Or only when the defendent was black? How about when the defendent was white? Was poor? Was a repeat offender?…At some point, do we care about just getting a jury that just does a BETTER JOB?
* It’s common knowledge among defense attorneys with any significant experience that most prosecutors will strike as many black jurors as they can in cases involving black defendants. The responses of prosecutors listed in this article are typical of the lame responses I encountered in making Batson challenges. As long as the response is “race neutral”, the strike is allowed by the courts. Even boneheaded prosecutors can come up with race neutral excuses until the cows come home. The response doesn’t have to make any sense. It only has to be race neutral. I would assume that Batson was intended as an attempt to provide black defendants with a jury of their peers. If so, it is an abject failure, a toothless tiger.
* Both sides exclude jurors in any trial. The prosecution wants someone hard on crime. The defense wants someone leinent.
The fact is that the vast majority of blacks are sympathetic to other blacks. There is nothing wrong with that. Over 90% of blacks voted for Obama twice. It was their right. If 90% of whites voted white, Obama would never have been elected!
Over half of all blacks believe that the police are prejudiced against blacks. Why would a prosecutor ever want a person with that belief on their jury regardless of race?
If you were the prosecutor and had lost cases because a black refused to find another black guilty, what would you do? if you were a lawyer repesenting a black, would you favor a black over a white prospective juror? The fact is that they both do so most of the time.
You want to stop it. Don’t let either side see the prospective juror during questioning. Of course, both sides can often tell the race by the voice and answers to some questions.
* As a former prosecutor, I can tell you exactly why it is done. I’ve seen multiple examples of extremely guilty black defendants go free because a black(s) on the jury simply would not vote to convict one of their own. The game becomes being able to articulate a non race based reason to exercise a peremptory challenge against a black whom a prosecutor knows good and well based on experience will not convict a fellow black if left on the jury.
* Having personally experienced two cases in which a black juror was the only “no” vote to convict an obviously guilty black defendant, (“I just don’t think he’s guilty”) and found the same situation encountered by several friends, I certainly understand the angst of having black jurors excluded based on race.
Just don’t complain about crime in your neighborhood or try to move into mine.
