In Nashville, Tennessee, it took a white male juror to expose the most insidious form of white privilege that continues to exist – the privilege that in many jurisdictions black defendants are still judged more often than not by all white juries. White juries that result from the deliberate exclusion of eligible black jurors by prosecutors.
He stood up and told the judge he did not think it was right for two black men to face a jury with no black members on it.
The juror’s words to Criminal Court Judge Cheryl Blackburn earlier this month — confirmed by attorneys and others present in the courtroom — led to the delay of a trial and brought Nashville into a growing national discussion about the diversity of juries.
For days, the relatives of the two African American defendants had been outraged by what they saw as intentional exclusion of all potential black jurors by the prosecution. Both men had been in jail for 18 months awaiting trial, but when their trial was finally scheduled, five potential black jurors, the only ones called from the jury pool, were peremptorily excused from serving on the jury, i.e., they were automatically removed from consideration without any reason being given.
Now it is standard practice in most legal jurisdictions for each side in a criminal trial, the defense and the prosecution, to have a number of such peremptory challenges that allow them to strike potential jurors from consideration without offering any reason. And for many years, the diversity of jury pools has been an issue in cases that involve minority defendants. It’s not just some bygone discriminatory practice that the Civil Rights movement ended back in the day, as this 2010 American Bar Association journal article makes crystal clear.
And of you think that black defendants can get a fair trial by all white juries, well, the fact is you would be fooling yourself. All white juries, even in our post-racial era, are far more prone to convict black defendants than racially diverse juries.
Duke University released a study [in April, 2012] that examined the impact of race in jury pools in Florida, and there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that, according to the study, which looked at 700 cases between 2000 and 2010, all-white jury pools are significantly more likely to lead to convictions of black defendants than white ones. The good news is that a single black juror in the pool can alter that dynamic. […]
Two particularly salient points from Duke’s summary of the study:
— In cases with no blacks in the jury pool, blacks were convicted 81 percent of the time, and whites were convicted 66 percent of the time. The estimated difference in conviction rates rises to 16 percent when the authors controlled for the age and gender of the jury and the year and county in which the trial took place.
— When the jury pool included at least one black person, the conviction rates were nearly identical: 71 percent for black defendants, 73 percent for whites.
So you can understand why the grandmother of one defendant and the mother of the other, despite the delay a new trial will cause, were delighted that this single individual spoke out against what he viewed as a judicial process that was fundamentally unfair.
They lamented another delay in the case. But they said they do not think the first jury would have been fair.
“There was an angel in the courtroom that day,” Steele said of the juror. “Good for him for speaking up.”
Angel or not, his action was the right one to take. It’s all too clear in America that African Americans do not receive the full benefit of their Sixth Amendment constitutional right to a trial by an impartial jury of their peers, when only white people sit in judgment upon them.
