Week 3, Entry 1: A jury of your peers...

• An African-American defendant tried and convicted by an all white jury in a county where 55 percent of the population is African-American.


• A prosecutor dismissed every minority member of a jury pool and then used a racist argument to incite the all white jury to convict the African-American defendant and not let him "get away with it."

Do the above examples sound like incidents from the 1950s or 1960s? Actually, one incident occurred in 1985 and the other in 1995. And by no means are they isolated incidents, such injustices continue to occur. Though it can be argued that we are entitled to a trial by a jury of our peers, there is no such guarantee in the Sixth Amendment. However, the Sixth Amendment does guarantee our right to a jury trial and most would agree that juries should reflect the community from which they are selected.

Unfortunately, juries often do not reflect the local community and can be prone to bias and groupthink. Minority and poor defendants are often tried by all white juries or by juries comprised entirely of people of a different socioeconomic status. A great example of this would be O.J. Simpson. Though he was acquitted when tried for murder (mostly due to having the best attorneys money could buy), his luck ran out when he was tried and convicted of armed robbery in Nevada and sent to prison. This time, the case was heard by a jury that was all white except for one Hispanic member. Defense attorneys are currently claiming jury bias and citing the racial composition of the jury in appeals. Whether there was actually any bias on the part of the jury or not, one really must ask why there were no African-Americans on the jury.

African Americans make up 13.5 percent of the U.S. population, yet in the Deep South they can make up as much as 38 percent of the population. Though we don’t have a right to a jury with members of the same race, one must ask why no minorities are selected for so many trials. Prosecutors are skilled at stacking juries in their favor, and many minority defendants, many of whom are poor, cannot afford an attorney skilled enough to stack the jury in THEIR favor. This may explain in part the high percentage of minorities on death row.





Though we’d like to relegate racism to the past, it is still very much alive, along with classism and sexism. Diversity in our juries is an attainable means to ensure fairness and live up to our ideals and jury selection guidelines should ensure that no jury consists of only one racial, ethnic or socioeconomic group. It is the least we can do to ensure justice is served and discrimination is not perpetuated in the justice system.