Study finds blacks blocked from southern juries (New York Times)

...jury makeup varies widely by jurisdiction, the organization, which studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — found areas in all of them where significant problems persist. In Alabama, courts have found racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases since 1987, and there are counties where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members have been struck in death penalty cases.

An analysis of Jefferson Parish, La., by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center found that from 1999 to 2007, blacks were struck from juries at more than three times the rate of whites.

In North Carolina, at least 26 current death row defendants were sentenced by all-white juries. In South Carolina, a prosecutor said he struck a black potential juror because he “shucked and jived” when he walked.



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02jury.html?hp

ethnic cleansing by a supposedly respectable name.
It is wrong in every case, not just in the cases of the innocent.

In the north too, for that matter.

back in April. Initially, there were in the neighborhood of 130 potential jurors, and I counted 12 blacks among that number. That's about 9.2 per cent in a county that has a black population of around 11.25 per cent, according to the 2000 census, which is a little on the low side, perhaps, but not outrageously so. What was troublesome to me was the fact that after the presiding judge addressed the prospective jurors and asked any who wished to be excused from jury duty to come forward, fully 11 of the 12 black people did so. The final juror pool count came to 108, 4 of those being black; in other words, 3.7 per cent of the total. Why people would exclude themselves from a system that they would have been excluded from by law in the not too distant past, I can't say. I would suspect that they, as a group, do not have confidence in the system itself. Whether or not these numbers are consistently true, I have no idea. This is, after all, only one case that I personally witnessed.
It is also worth noting that in the four cases presented to juror panels I was on, one was a case involving a stolen credit card, one involving possession of and the attempt to distribute marijuana, and two cases of cocaine possession. All four defendants were young black males, and, as I read later in the local paper, the defendant in the marijuana case, which involved just over one pound of the substance, was convicted and received a sentence of 35 years.

The skewed representation in the initial pool is systemic and unavoidable: They go by valid voter address/registration or by driver's license. If you have both you're more likely to be called up; minorities have lower voter registration, so unless there's a race-based correction you'll get a skewed candidate pool before being summoned. If you don't get paid by your employer or have some other hardship you can be exempted. If blacks are disproportionately in that group, they're disproportionately exempted. No racism involved. In some cities where the government is disproportionately black jury pools are disproportionately black because government agencies encourage jury duty.

Then there's the trial aspect. If you're a black defendant, you might want blacks in your jury if you think they'll have empathy for you but not the victim. If you're the prosecutor, you'd want to avoid precisely those blacks for service on that jury. If you're a white defendant and the victim is black, you might want to avoid blacks because they'd empathize with the victim and not you. This striking of jurors isn't necessarily racism, either--the argument can be made that the disparate empathy shown by race is racism and this is either avoiding or making use of what's already there. All's fair, so to speak. But it can be racism. That can't just be assumed because it's very obvious there are valid reasons for this.

It happens in the North, too. It's just that there was no reason to really ding the North and every reason to smugly ding the South. A more useful article would be to look at how often it occurs in the North and in the South, but that would also need to take into account reasons for having black juror nominees excluded, and some of those are going to be based on the legal code. After all, exemptions count as exclusions, and I've been in states where you can't just say, "Let me out" and get exempted.

Again, what's not said is sometimes just as important or even more important than what is said. It's why critical thinking is important.