Prosecutors use a system of “strikes” to engineer nearly all-white juries

https://bostonreview.net/law-justice/sonali-chakravarti-one%E2%80%99s-peers

by huihuiilly • 7 years ago

6 2 7 years ago

I was was on jury duty about 10 years ago and any white union members or anyone affiliated with a union were sent home by the prosecuting attorney.

This article is trying to make it seem like it's only done out of racism, when in reality, it's done to potentially help an attorney's client..and a person with any gender, skin color, political affiliation, or other bias can be eliminated.

salawat• 7 years ago

This is a fairly well known practice. Voir dire is one of the realms of voodoo in the legal system where defense and prosecutor alike are given the chance to engineer a jury.

This is actually the process surrounding the concept of a jury of one's peers, and one of those things that I really wish people would realize is not a big deal unless you truly think skin color or racial identity matters.

If you do, shame on you. You shouldn't be doing that. We illegalized that back in the last century. Whether or not everyone else has caught up doesn't matter. In the eyes of the law, it is verboten.

Hence the voodoo part of voir dire. If a hypothetical client is an African American male who grew up on what is colloquially considered the "wrong side of town", do I want my client's jury saturated with people from a gated community? What about the inverse? Same AA male, from a gated community, do I want to saturate the jury with people from the projects?

Take that type of dilemma and expand it to just about any other aspect of your client's circumstances, and you get what goes on in voir dire. Your prosecutor and defense both jockeying for the best jury they can, and the result is assumed to be something somewhere in the middle. The prosecution and defense get the same number of strikes.

Whether or not that always happens; or that one side starts off with a more favorable pool than the other given the random selection mechanism for jury candidates is an open and valid question.

Prosecutors use a system of “strikes” to engineer nearly all-white juries

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