SCOTUS has a case coming up dealing with a case in GA where the prosecutor had notes about removing black jurors. Guy was found guilty of murder with an all-white jury. He's black.

 

I read that in 1986 SCOTUS ruled on KY case and said jurors cannot be eliminated based on race.

 

How in the world could that ever be proven if a prosecutor is smart enough to not have notes detailing the practice?

I thought both the prosecution and defense could remove some jurors (not sure how many) for ANY reason, including race, religion, hair style, height...anything...

I thought both the prosecution and defense could remove some jurors (not sure how many) for ANY reason, including race, religion, hair style, height...anything...

 

Peremptory challenges. You used to be able to use them for any reason, but since that case Clyde was talking about above (Batson v. Kentucky), you can't use race as a reason for striking a juror. You also can't use gender, which was decided in a later case.

 

The way this comes up is that if one side strikes a certain juror and the other side challenges on Batson grounds, the other side has to give a non-race reason for striking the juror. Batson hearings aren't particularly effective but it cut out a lot of the more egregious stuff like this.

 

A lot of this was foreseen by Justice Thurgood Marshall, who wrote a concurrence on that Batson decision in which he said that the only way this would ever really stop was to get rid of peremptory challenges completely.

 

You can also strike a juror at any time for cause, but the rules on strikes for cause are a little different.

@Getslow, it's fun to try to guess BGP-er's vocations/professions/jobs based on various things one sees on here. I'm beginning to think that my guess that you are a British author of classic high-fantasy literature is incorrect. The pipe threw me for a while. Now I suspect you are just a British philologist and university professor. Am I getting warm?

 

 

 

@theguru, this is just tongue-in-cheek and not an attempt to identify Getslow or anything about him.

Studies have shown that these proffered reasons are often a mere pretext for racial discrimination. A North Carolina study of jury selection in 173 death penalty cases found that black prospective jurors were more than twice as likely to be struck by the prosecution as similarly situated white jurors. A 2003 study of 390 felony jury trials prosecuted in Jefferson Parish, La. found that black prospective jurors were struck at three times the rate of whites. And in Houston County, Ala., prosecutors between 2005 and 2009 used their peremptory strikes to eliminate 80 percent of the blacks qualified for jury service in death penalty cases. The result was that half of these juries were all white, and the remainder had only a single black member, even though the county is 27 percent black.

 

Supreme Court Takes On Racial Discrimination In Jury Selection : NPR