How Southern Prosecutors Keep Blacks Off Juries

The right to be tried by a jury of your peers is a cornerstone of the U.S. criminal justice system. But tell that to prosecutors across the South — who, as a new study shows, are still adamantly working to keep blacks out of the jury box.

Of course, you can't kick someone off a jury simply for being black. But you can offer any number of evidently race-neutral reasons for not wanting someone to serve. For example: this past April, when one Alabama prosecutor was asked to explain why he'd struck 11 out of 14 potential black jurors from a murder case, he furnished reasons such as these: the proposed jurors were "arrogant," or too "vocal." Others — including a retired Defense Department program analyst — he said lacked "sophistication."

If these sound like code words to you, they are: code words with a lengthy history. For generations, as the New York Times writes, similar arguments about black intelligence and education were used to keep juries all-white in the segregationist South — thereby stripping black defendants and victims the right to a fair trial. Today, according to the Equal Justice Initiative's new report, their use is still rampant across the South, the result being that in a state like North Carolina, at least 26 prisoners currently on death row were condemned by all-white juries.

Some of the reasons prosecutors offer for rejecting black jurors are at least superficially race-neutral. Others are decidedly less so. In South Carolina, for example, a prosecutor dismissed one black juror because of how he "shucked and jived" when he walked. In Louisiana, one black juror was dismissed because the prosecutor decided he "looked like a drug dealer."

Such a trend helps explain how a black man like Curtis Flowers — a Mississippi man sentenced to death in 2004 for killing four employees at a furniture store — could be judged by a nearly all-white jury, even though the county in which the crime occurred is nearly half black. Or likewise, why in certain counties among the eight Southern states the Equal Justice Initiative studied, over 75% of black jury pool members were struck in death penalty cases. In the case of Jefferson Parish, LA, blacks are removed from juries at more than three times the rate whites are.

Though studies show that racially diverse juries are more deliberative and make fewer factual errors than all-white juries — and though excluding jurors because of race has been illegal since 1875 — that hasn't stopped prosecutors from strategizing to keep their juries lily white.

“Anybody with any sense at all can think up any race-neutral reason and get away with it,” says Stephen Bright, an Atlanta capital defense lawyer.

As the Equal Justice Initiative notes, jury diversity is especially key, given how other levers within the criminal justice system are mostly white. Out of the eight states the report studied, over 93% of district attorneys are white — and in the states of Arkansas and Tennessee, fully all of them are.

Back in 1906, says Christopher Waldrep, a San Francisco State University historian, all-white juries "really made lynching and the Ku Klux Klan possible." Which begs the question: what kinds of injustices are the all-white juries of today enabling?

Photo Credit: quinn.anya