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Race, Juries, and Criminal Justice

By Steve Hall

Statistician Gary Liberson posts, "The Uneven Hand of Justice," at Huffington Post. The game prosecutors play is simple. There is a strong rejection by Blacks of the death penalty (See graph). So Southern prosecutors know the likelihood of successfully seeking the death penalty depends on the exclusion of Black jurors who are part of the jury pool (i.e., voir dire). Because the prosecution has a finite number of challenges (i.e., exclusions), the prosecutor must have a pool of jurors that does not have a high number of Black jurors. It is this balance between challenges and the number of Blacks in the jury pool that dictates whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty. Depending on the demographics of a county, the pool of Black jurors can be so small that a prosecutor can remove all Blacks from serving on a jury for a particular case...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on July 06, 2010 (boomark / email).