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Justice in the Jury Box

By Steve Hall

That's the title of an editorial in the Saturday edition of the New York Times.  LINK In 1986, when the Supreme Court reached a landmark decision forbidding prosecutors from routinely excluding blacks from juries without a good explanation, Justice Thurgood Marshall warned it would not end racial exclusions. Some prosecutors, he wrote in a concurring opinion, would simply invent phony reasons. The grim truth in Justice Marshall?s prediction is illuminated in a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. It shows how pervasive racial exclusions remain, particularly in the South. Prosecutors routinely use peremptory challenges to remove blacks from juries, aware that all-white juries are statistically far more likely to impose the death penalty...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on June 07, 2010 (boomark / email).