Jury Sunshine Project: Yes, Jury Selection Is Racist

The United States Constitution makes it clear that race cannot factor into the process of jury selection for criminal trials. But a new statewide study on juror removal shows that colorblind ideal is far from being realized in the Tar Heel State. The Jury Sunshine Project is led by Wake Forest University Professor of Law Ron Wright.

The winnowing of nonwhite jurors is not a quirk of just one state, but Wright says this broad-based research effort involving jury selection outcomes in felony trials in all 100 counties of North Carolina confirms its existence here for the very first time.  

He spoke with WFDD's David Ford.

Interview Highlights

On how jury selection works:

The judge asks 12 potential jurors some basic questions—Can you do your duty? Are you related to any of the parties?—and may then remove some jurors for a legal cause. Then the prosecutor and defense attorneys take their turns asking questions. The prosecutor gets six what are called preemptory strikes or unexplained strikes. You don't have to have a reason just for any reason or no reason—except for a couple of bad reasons—but for any reason or no reason the prosecutor and the defense attorney can remove up to six people from the panel and then they're replaced with somebody else. The bad reasons? Race and gender. The Constitution says that you can't remove somebody because of their race or because of their gender. So you can remove people from the same race, but that can't be the reason you're removing them.

On what the Jury Sunshine Project data revealed:

It is amazing how much you can see by looking at the overall aggregate patterns rather than just looking at things one case at a time. The whole legal system is set up to evaluate one case at a time and that's important. But you miss so much by just focusing on one and then moving on to the next and then moving on to the next. And you don't end up seeing the larger patterns between the cases.

On the challenges of collecting data:

Yeah, we had to hit the road. I mean, we had to drive to all 100 county courthouses in the state of North Carolina. So, I drove to some of them, my colleagues came in and drove to some of them, Wake Forest college students drove to some of them for us, Wake Forest law students drove to some, librarians in the law library put the convertible top down and went on the road for jury data. So, it was a big statewide collection process.

On what the data showed:

Some of what we saw just confirmed sort of common wisdom, but that's an important part of empirical research—to find out that thing everybody believes true is really true. We thought that probably the judges and the prosecutors and the defense attorneys would roughly equally remove people from the jury, and that turned out to be almost true. The defense attorneys are somewhat more active than the judges or the prosecutors. But then we also thought that both parties, both the prosecutor and the defense attorney, would remove people based on race.

They can't acknowledge that that's what's going on. But we thought there would be a racial impact or racial effect of removal process. And that turned out to be true. But it turns out at the end of the day that African-American male jurors are the ones who end up underrepresented on the jury pools. The defense attorney choices don't quite cancel out the earlier choices in the process because they're operating on a smaller pool. You know, they only get to make their choices after the judge and the prosecutor is satisfied with the 12 that are in the box and so they're operating on a fewer number of jurors.