Justice in the Jury Box

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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. In Jefferson Parish, La., the study says, blacks were removed from juries three times as often as whites. In Houston County, Ala., nearly 80 percent of blacks who qualified for jury service have been struck from capital cases by prosecutors.

The court’s 1986 Batson v. Kentucky decision requires prosecutors to explain peremptory challenges, if defendants can show a pattern of racial exclusions. As Justice Marshall predicted, prosecutors have had no trouble coming up with an increasingly absurd list.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/opinion/06sun2.html?th&emc=th