NC should end race-based juror selection

[Judi Lynn]

BY SATANA DEBERRY AND MIRIAM KRINSKY
AUGUST 04, 2019 12:00 AM

From unconscious bias to outright racism, race has played a significant role in creating a justice system that too often results in unfair and unjust outcomes. The negative impact of race is nowhere more evident than in jury selection, with North Carolina providing a particularly illustrative — and troubling — case study.

Across North Carolina, prosecutors remove twice as many potential black jurors as white jurors during jury selection. And black people are four times more likely to be imprisoned than white people. The same trends exist in death penalty juries, resulting in black defendants being twice as likely as their white counterparts to be sentenced to death for identical crimes.

Whether these disparities are the product of implicit or explicit bias — it is a profound injustice and the cost is black lives. That’s why Fair and Just Prosecution and over a dozen other groups joined together to ask North Carolina’s Supreme Court to stand up against the entrenched practice of excluding people of color from juries.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that it was illegal to exclude citizens from juries because of their race and set up a process for assessing these challenges, but the North Carolina appellate courts have yet to find race discrimination against a juror of color, and have routinely disregarded U.S. Supreme Court rules for addressing jury discrimination concerns. North Carolina is one of only a handful of states that has never enforced the ban on race-based jury selection.

More:
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article233449952.html

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