Were there no women allowed in jury's in the '50s? And no blacks or other minorities?
The law did not allow race-based exclusion of blacks from juries, but it often happened. The legal history is as follows:
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. This included a provision that "No State shall [...] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Although there's been debate and controversy since then about the scope of the Equal Protection Clause, it's commonly understood (and indeed obvious) that its core purpose was to safeguard the rights of the newly freed slaves.
In 1880, the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause guaranteed the right of blacks to serve on juries, and that thus a West Virginia law barring blacks from jury service was unconstitutional. (Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303) The Court explicitly stated that its ruling did not address the question of whether a black defendant has any right to have blacks on his or her jury.
In a criminal trial, each side can strike an unlimited number of jurors for cause, with the judge's approval. For example, if the potential juror happens to be the defendant's brother, the prosecution can ask the judge to excuse that juror on the grounds that the juror could not be expected to impartially consider the case and should not be asked to do so. Challenges for cause require some "hard" and objective reasons which the judge recognizes as legitimate. However, each side can also strike a limited number of jurors without cause with "peremptory challenges," which do not require the judge's approval -- for example, maybe the defense attorney notices that the potential juror gave the defendant a particularly disdainful look but does not have a hard reason to ask the judge to exclude that juror.
Peremptory challenges are a necessary part of our judicial system. Sometimes bias is recognizable even if the reasons can't be clearly articulated, and attorneys need to be able to act on this to protect their clients' interests. However, prosecuting attorneys often used peremptory challenges to exclude jurors who happened to be of the same race as the defendant. Unconstitutional? Sure. But what could be done? In such cases, the prosecution did not have to give reasons for the challenges.
This issue came before the Supreme Court in 1965, in Swain v. Alabama (380 U.S. 202). Both Swain and another case I'll get to in a moment (Batson) are rather complicated, and I'll oversimplify and paraphrase them here. Essentially the Court held in Swain that members of a particular ethnic group might end up being excluded from a jury for any number of reasons other than race-based discrimination -- e.g., simple random variance in the composition of the particular jury panel drawn from the community; peremptory challenges for reasons other than race; et cetera -- and that therefore a claim of racial discrimination in peremptory challenges could not be supported with evidence only from any single case. A defendant making such a claim would at least have to show that discrimination had happened in other cases in that district and/or with the same prosecutor(s) -- in other words, "it didn't just happen to me, it goes on around here all the time."
In 1986, the issue came before the Supreme Court again in Batson v. Kentucky (476 U.S. 79). The Court held that the burden of proof set in Swain, although it appeared reasonable "on paper" when the Court came up with it, had proven in practice to be impossible to meet no matter what the strength of the defense's claim (for example, because of limitations in records kept of jurors and jury selection). The new bar that the defendant had to meet went like this. First, it was not necessary for the defendant to call in events from other trials. The defendant did have to show that (a) he or she was a member of a cognizable racial group; (b) the disputed juror(s) were members of the same racial group; and (c) these and whatever other facts (if any) the defense presents raised at least an inference that race-based discrimination had occurred. Once the defense met that burden of proof, the prosecutor had to state an acceptable race-neutral reason for the peremptory challenge, or the challenge would not stand. Because legitimate peremptory challenges by their nature are based on reasons which would not justify a challenge for cause and are often subjective, the burden of proof the prosecution must meet here is considerably lower than that for a challenge for cause.
That's the current standard, at least by the book. In practice, what happens is this. Prosecutors still use peremptory challenges to exclude blacks from cases involving black defendants, Asians from cases involving Asian defendants, etc. These exclusions automatically raise "Batson challenges" from the defense. The defense points out that the defendant is a member of race X and that the disputed juror is a member of race X. The judge rules that the defense's burden of proof has been met (even though the defense has not shown (c) above) and calls upon the prosecution to give some reason for the challenge. And the prosecution, already knowing that a Batson challenge is inevitable in such circumstances, already has some reason ready.
Note that none of this diminishes the right of the prosecution to exclude jurors of the same race as the defendant, provided that the exclusion is for legitimate reasons which have nothing to do with race. It simply means that excluding jurors who are of the same race as the defendant because they are the same race as the defendant is forbidden.
Also, none of this means that a defendant has any right to have members of his or her race on the jury -- indeed, in Batson the Court explicitly stated that a defendant does not have that right. Jury panels are drawn from and are intended to be representative of local communities, and if a black defendant is put on trial in a county that happens to be 98% white, that defendant will almost certainly get an all-white jury. On the other hand, if the community is 50% black and the jury panel reflects this, the prosecution cannot strike black jurors if the reason is that the defendant is also black.
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hamiam3
10 years ago
You really need to get a life.
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SirWizard
9 years ago
Commenter BullSchmidt very obviously already has a full life of intelligence, thoughtfulness, and erudition. The excellent scholarly presentation explains key elements of jury selection. BullSchmidt studied history and jurisprudence for self-education and wrote here to educate us. (Thank you!) By comparison, hamiam3 surely received many facial punctures while learning to eat with a fork, not realizing that having an open mouth is helpful during certain phases of eating, and keeping a closed mouth is helpful when considering to prattle a worthless catchphrase.
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